Can I mosaic/stitch images together with only 0-5% overlap?

General Help
#1

In the interest in maximizing my ability to cover lots of acreage per flight, and I don’t need a beautiful looking ortho or DSM, is there a process to simply georeference (that’s the term that comes to mind, but also could be stitching, mosaicing…not sure) images with only like 5% front and side overlap, or even no overlap? I don’t care if trees are falling over, I just want a georeferenced raster dataset where I can look at all the images in a GIS - preferably as a mosaiced tif or something like that. I am trying to conduct broad area imagery searches, that’s why I don’t need ortho quality, just looking for particular objects. The quantity of data precludes manually georeferencing. I also can’t just drop the raw jpg into a GIS and have it lay where it needs to.

Sorry if this has been covered already!

Thanks!
Patrick

#2

Welcome!

Very likely not.

Give it a try with Microsoft Image Composite Editor or another naive stitching program (Hugin) and see if they can make anything of it. If not, you’re probably out of luck.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for some suggestions. I think I’ve made some assumptions about what kind of metadata exists in drone imagery!

#4

It’s not an issue of Metadata, more of doing the reconstruction. Matching features isn’t easy, which is why sufficient overlap is necessary. The more pixels in common, the more likely a feature can be matched.

A robust naive stitching program doesn’t need/use the Metadata at all, just matched fearures, and may be more tolerant of the low overlap.

#5

That said, you may be able to get away with 20% overlap and using the --fast-orthophoto flag.

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#6

I guess what i meant about metadata is the sensor has a GPS position of varying accuracy, it knows technical specs about it’s sensor and where it’s pointing, I would have thought it could then determine coordinates for the four corners of an image.

#7

Thanks, I will give that a try!

#8

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