Automatic Mosaicking & Mosaic Tool

Geomatica 2015 Tutorial

The purpose of this tutorial is to highlight Geomaticas advanced automated mosaicking capability. The
primary mosaicking operations that will be exposed in this tutorial are image normalization, cutline
editing and image colour balancing. New colour balancing tools have been added in Geomatica 2015
which are outlined in the colour balancing section of this tutorial.

Project Setup
1. Open the Geomatica 2015 OrthoEngine application

2. In the OrthoEngine menu bar, click File New

3. Give your project a Filename, Name and Description
a. Select None (mosaic only) as the Math Modeling Method
b. Click OK
4. Input the appropriate Output projection and Resolution for the project

5. Click OK

Adding Images to the Project

1. In OrthoEngine, change the Processing step to Image Input
2. Click on Open new or existing image button

3. In the Open Image panel, click New Image

4. In the File Selector navigate to the images you want to input

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 1
 5. Click OK to the pop up message

6. Click Close

Define Mosaic
1. In OrthoEngine select the Display Project Overview button

2. The Project Overview window opens to display all of the images in the project.

3. Close this panel

4. In OrthoEngine, change the Processing step to Mosaic

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 2
5. Click the Define Mosaic Area button

6. In the Define Mosaic Area panel, click Browse

7. In the File Selector, select the output file name and location for the mosaic fill
8. Leave everything else as default in Define Mosaic Area Dialog box

Footprints
The Define Mosaic panel allows the user to define the mosaic file that will be used to hold the
mosaicked imagery. In this panel, the user can:
- Set which images to include in the mosaic, by selecting/unselecting the footprints
- Set the mosaic bounds by dragging the red rectangular boundary extent
- Specify, which channels to include and the bit-depth of the channels

9. Click OK

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 3
Generate Mosaic
1. In OrthoEngine, click the Automatic mosaicking button

2. In the Automatic Mosaicking panel, change the Normalization method to Adaptive Filter by
selecting it in the dropdown list and click Apply All

For optical imagery, the Adaptive Filter and Hotspot are the only 2 normalization methods that are
relevant.
3. Under Mosaicking Options, ensure Bundle method is selected. This option must be selected in
order to use the new colour balancing tools.
4. Leave the Cutline options as their defaults

5. Under File Options, click Browse next to preview file and ensure this is saved to your desired
directory.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 4
6. The panel should look like below:

7. Click Generate Preview

Mosaic Preview and Generation

Generate Preview creates a low-resolution version of the mosaic. The
preview file is saved under the path and file name specified in the Preview
File box. You can use the preview of the mosaic to verify the color balance
and cutline selection before continuing with the full resolution version. Click
on Generate Mosaic and this will process all files and create the full-
resolution version of the mosaic. The output mosaic is saved under the path
and file name defined in the Define Mosaic window.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 5
8. The Progress Monitor opens

9. The following preview will appear:

About the Preview

The preview mosaic is a very valuable output, because it is a low

resolution preview of the final mosaic, which provides the user with a
strong idea of how the automatic settings for the color balancing and
cutlines will turn out. Preview takes a fraction of the time to generate
as compared to the final full resolution mosaic, so different settings can
be used in different runs to compare which parameter set will provide
the best results.

10. If you are satisfied with the results, you may click the Generate Mosaic button on the
Automatic Mosaicking window to generate the full-size mosaic. If you are not satisfied, you
may try different color balancing methods and run the Generate Preview again.

*NEW COLOUR BALANCING: If you are generally satisfied with the results, but see a few areas
where the automatic color balancing was not correct, you can edit your full mosaic in the

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 6
 Manual Mosaicking tool. This will be covered in the Colour Balancing step in this tutorial. Make
sure you generate the full mosaic, using the Bundle colour balancing method before you begin
the colour balancing edits.

Edit a Cutline
Once you have generated the mosaic using the Bundle colour balance method you can perform edits
and additional colour balancing by choosing the Manual Mosaic tool. Before you perform colour
balancing you should fix any cutline issues.

1. Open the Manual Mosaicking tool from the Orthoengine toolbar.

2. Your new mosaic will appear. If you expand the mosaic file you can see which images are
included in the mosaic. If you would like to change the cutlines or perform colour balancing on
an image right-click the image and choose Reprocess.

3. Select the image you chose to reprocess from the image tree list. Click the Collection View

button
4. The collection viewer opens and your working image is shown on top. Using the neighbors

toggle button you can choose to display the neighboring image underneath.
5. Zoom into one section of your image along the cutline that overlaps the neighboring image.
You can experiment with blend width, contrast, brightness and visualization mode.

6. To edit the cutline, click on the Vector Editing Toolbar icon .

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 7
 The Vector Editing Tools window opens. You must select the cutline using the find button in the
vector editing toolbar. Once selected, the vector editing tools will be available.

7. You can add vertices or move current vertices and reshape your cutlines. For instance you may
wish to reshape cutlines that fall in a waterbody since these are likely to change colour across
the images. In the images below a cutline through a lake has been edited. You will also notice

that the cutline clipping is enabled in the second image. This option allows the user to
clip the working image to the cutline.

Colour Balancing
Once you have edited the cutlines to minimize large colour matching issues you can edit the colour
balancing for areas of poor matching.

1. In the Manual Mosaic window the colour balancing toolbar will be available.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 8
 .

2. Zoom to an area of the image where the images did not match well, such as the blue
highlighted area above.

3. Use the Select tool and select the left image. It will flash cyan to indicate that it has been
selected. In the situation above the image on the right is darker and more blue than the image
on the left. We will add edge dodging points and change the colour and brightness of this area.

4. Using the add edge point tool place three dodging points along the edge of the colour
change.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 9
5. Select all three points and open the dodging brightness slider

6. You can adjust this slider to change the brightness of the image that you selected. You can also

chose to only change specific bands by changing the channel selection .

7. For this section of the image the channel selection will be changed to blue. You can then
increase the dodging brightness. Continue adjusting the brightness of each band until you have
a satisfactory result.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 10
8. Another type of dodging points are floating dodging points. You can use these points to fix local
problems without affecting other areas of the image.

9. On the toolbar, click on Floating Dodging Points button

10. Right click to place a floating dodging point in about the following location

11. In order to prevent the brightness changes made to this point from spreading to the rest of the
image you can place other dodging points around the one you created.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 11
12. You can now select the middle (red) point and adjust the brightness of that dodging point.

13. Place additional dodging points and adjust their brightness as required.
14. Make sure to save your project using File > Save on the OrthoEngine panel.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 12
Reapply Mosaicking
In this step you will add your edits to your mosaic.

1. Once you have made all the necessary edits to each of the reprocessed images you will need to
add those edited images back into the mosaic. In order to do this you can reapply mosaicking.
The cutlines and colour balancing edits that you made will be applied but the original
mosaicking order will be maintained.
a. Close the Manual Mosaic window and save your project.
b. On the OrthoEngine toolbar click the Reapply Mosaicking button

c. Click Generate Mosaic. You can now open your mosaic in focus to see the edits that
were added

2. Another way that you can save the edits to your mosaic is to right-click the image in the Manual
Mosaicking window and choose Add to Mosaic. The image that you add will be added on top of
the other images. You should only use Add to Mosaic if you wish to change the order of your
mosaicked images.

The information in this document is subject to change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by PCI Geomatics.
PCI Geomatics assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document. Page | 13