Enhancing Georeferencing and Mosaicking Techniques over Water Surfaces with High-Resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Imagery

Abstract

Aquatic ecosystems are crucial in preserving biodiversity, regulating biogeochemical cycles, and sustaining human life; however, their resilience against climate change and anthropogenic stressors remains poorly understood. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become a vital monitoring tool, bridging the gap between satellite imagery and ground-based observations in coastal and marine environments with high spatial resolution. The dynamic nature of water surfaces poses a challenge for photogrammetric techniques due to the absence of fixed reference points. Addressing these issues, this study introduces an innovative, efficient, and accurate workflow for georeferencing and mosaicking that overcomes previous limitations. Using open-source Python libraries, this workflow employs direct georeferencing to produce a georeferenced orthomosaic that integrates multiple UAV captures, and this has been tested in multiple locations worldwide with optical RGB, thermal, and multispectral imagery. The best case achieved a Root Mean Square Error of 4.52 m and a standard deviation of 2.51 m for georeferencing accuracy, thus preserving the UAV’s centimeter-scale spatial resolution. This open-source workflow represents a significant advancement in the monitoring of marine and coastal processes, resolving a major limitation facing UAV technology in the remote observation of local-scale phenomena over water surfaces.