This work proposes strategies and solutions to tackle the problem of
building photo-mosaics of very large underwater optical surveys,
presenting contributions to the image preprocessing, enhancing and
blending steps, and resulting in an improved visual quality of the final
photo-mosaic. The text opens with a comprehensive review of mosaicing
and blending techniques, before proposing an approach for large scale
underwater image mosaicing and blending. In the image preprocessing
step, a depth dependent illumination compensation function is used to
solve the non-uniform illumination appearance due to light attenuation.
For image enhancement, the image contrast variability due to different
acquisition altitudes is compensated using an adaptive contrast
enhancement based on an image quality reference selected through a total
variation criterion. In the blending step, a graph-cut strategy
operating in the image gradient domain over the overlapping regions is
suggested. Next, an out-of-core blending strategy for very large scale
photo-mosaics is presented and tested on real data. Finally, the
performance of the approach is evaluated and compared with other
approaches.