An efficient method to build panoramic image mosaics

Abstract

This paper describes an efficient method to build panoramic image mosaics with multiple images. Conventional algorithms used geometrical feature points and optimization to compute the projective transformation, which is the relation between two consecutive images. However, building a panoramic image was very time consuming because of the iterative computation involved. The proposed method computed the projective transformation in overlapped areas of the two given images by using four seed points. The seed point is the highly textured point in the overlapped area of the reference image, which is extracted by using phase correlation. Because the region of interest (ROI) was restricted within overlapped areas of two images, more accurate correspondences were obtained. Before selecting the seed point, the histograms of the overlapped areas were equalized to mitigate the variation of the illumination conditions. After selecting the seed point, the weighted block matching algorithm (BMA) was used to minimize image distortion caused by camera rotation. An experiment was performed employing the proposed method with various images and the results were compared with peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Results showed that the proposed method built high-quality panoramic image mosaics in high speed.