Farmland Aerial Images Fast-Stitching Method and Application Based on Improved SIFT Algorithm

The main black land conservation measure in China is the straw return to the fields. The processing of high-resolution images collected by aerial photography of UAVs through image stitching technology can provide image information for achieving fast and accurate detection of straw cover over large areas. The classical SIFT algorithm has many drawbacks, such as high dimensionality of feature descriptors, high computational effort, and low matching efficiency. To solve the problems above, this study proposes an improved algorithm. First, the method down sampled the high-resolution images before detecting the features to reduce the number of feature points and improve the efficiency of feature detection. Then, matching among feature points is achieved by gradient normalization-based feature descriptors to improve the matching accuracy. Next, the Progressive Sample Consistency algorithm eliminates the mismatch points and optimizes the transformation model. Finally, the images are fused with optimal stitching combined with fade-in and fade-out to achieve high-quality stitching. The comparative experimental results show that compared with the traditional SIFT and the speed-up robust feature algorithms, the algorithm has the advantage of the speed and good robustness to angle rotation, and makes full use of the texture information and the detail information, so it has higher accuracy. Compared with the traditional methods, the panoramic stitching image quality herein is excellent and can be applied to subsequent straw cover detection, the straw cover error is ≤3%, meeting the demand for large-area straw cover detection. Overall, the method proposed herein achieves an ideal balance between accuracy and efficiency; and outperforms other widely used and superior methods.