A self-adaptive parallel image stitching algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicles in edge computing environments

The overlap between edge computing and unmanned aerial systems enables Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to quickly offload image processing tasks onto edge devices, avoiding the transmission of images over long distances. To improve the speed and efficiency of UAV image stitching in an edge computing environment, this paper proposes an adaptive UAV image parallel stitching algorithm in an edge computing environment. The algorithm incorporates both route-based parallel processing and inverted binary tree-based parallel processing, dividing the image stitching task into multiple processes and allocating them to different cores based on the CPU core count, number of flight routes, and number of images, thereby enhancing computational efficiency in edge scenarios. The experimental results indicate that, when the number of flight routes is greater than or equal to the number of CPUs, the adaptive algorithm will employ the more efficient route parallelism. Conversely, when the number of flight routes is less than the number of CPUs, the efficiency of inverted binary tree parallelism is higher. In the same experimental environment and dataset, the adaptive image stitching algorithm demonstrates an efficiency improvement of approximately 2-10 times compared to other algorithms, with no significant degradation in image quality. This demonstrates that in edge environments, the utilization of multi-threaded adaptive route and inverted binary tree-based parallel approaches can effectively harness the computing resources of edge devices, significantly improving the stitching speed of UAV images and providing technical support for rapid real-time monitoring by UAV.