LAPM: a tool for underwater Large-Area Photo-Mosaicking

This paper presents a new tool for large-area photo-mosaicking (LAPM tool). This tool was developed specifically for the purpose of underwater mosaicking, and it is aimed at providing end-user scientists with an easy and robust way to construct large photo-mosaics from any set of images. It is notably capable of constructing mosaics with unlimited amount of images and on any recent computer. The mosaicking process can rely on both feature matching and navigation data. This is complemented by an intuitive graphical user interface, which gives the user full control over the feature matches between any pair of overlapping images. Finally, mosaic files are given geographic attributes that allow direct import into ArcGIS. So far, the LAPM tool was successfully used to construct geo-referenced photo-mosaics with photo and video material from several scientific cruises. The largest photo-mosaic contained more than 5000 images for a total area of about 105 000 m2.