Real-Time Image Mosaicing Using Non-rigid Registration

Abstract

Abstract. Mosaicing is a classical application of image registration where images from the same scene are stitched together to generate a larger seamless image. This paper presents a real-time incremental mosaicing method that generates 2D mosaics by stitching video key-frames as soon as they are detected. The contributions are three-fold: (1) we propose a "fast" key-frame selection procedure based solely on the distribution of the distance of matched feature descriptors. This procedure automatically selects key-frames that are used to expand the mosaics while achieving real-time performance; (2) we register key-frame images by using a non-rigid deformation model in order to "smoothly" stitch images when scene transformations can not be expressed by homography: (3) we add a new constraint on the non-rigid deformation model that penalizes over-deformation in order to create "visually natural" mosaics. The performance of the proposed method was validated by experiments in non-controlled conditions and by comparison with the state-of-the-art method.

NRStitcher: non-rigid stitching of terapixel-scale volumetric images

“…In the following, the term 'non-rigid' stitching is used to refer to such methods, and the term 'rigid' to denote methods or transformations that do not incorporate arbitrary local deformations. In contrast to many previous non-rigid stitching algorithms (Castanheira de Souza et al, 2012;Yan et al, 2017;Yeung et al, 2008), the proposed method is readily suitable for stitching both 2D and 3D image mosaics. It is based on computing the local deformation field between the overlapping regions of the sub-images non-iteratively using (local) phase correlation (Kuglin and Hines, 1975;Tajima et al, 2012).…”