Adaptive as-natural-as-possible image stitching

Abstract

The goal of image stitching is to create natural-looking mosaics free of artifacts that may occur due to relative camera motion, illumination changes, and optical aberrations. In this paper, we propose a novel stitching method, that uses a smooth stitching field over the entire target image, while accounting for all the local transformation variations. Computing the warp is fully automated and uses a combination of local homography and global similarity transformations, both of which are estimated with respect to the target. We mitigate the perspective distortion in the non-overlapping regions by linearizing the homography and slowly changing it to the global similarity. The proposed method is easily generalized to multiple images, and allows one to automatically obtain the best perspective in the panorama. It is also more robust to parameter selection, and hence more automated compared with state-of-the-art methods. The benefits of the proposed approach are demonstrated using a variety of challenging cases.