Traditional image stitching approaches tend to leverage increasingly complex geometric features (point, line, edge, etc.) for better performance. However, these hand-crafted features are only suitable for specific natural scenes with adequate geometric structures. In contrast, deep stitching schemes overcome the adverse conditions by adaptively learning robust semantic features, but they cannot handle large-parallax cases due to homography-based registration. To solve these issues, we propose UDIS++, a parallax-tolerant unsupervised deep image stitching technique. First, we propose a robust and flexible warp to model the image registration from global homography to local thin-plate spline motion. It provides accurate alignment for overlapping regions and shape preservation for non-overlapping regions by joint optimization concerning alignment and distortion. Subsequently, to improve the generalization capability, we design a simple but effective iterative strategy to enhance the warp adaption in cross-dataset and cross-resolution applications. Finally, to further eliminate the parallax artifacts, we propose to composite the stitched image seamlessly by unsupervised learning for seam-driven composition masks. Compared with existing methods, our solution is parallax-tolerant and free from laborious designs of complicated geometric features for specific scenes. Extensive experiments show our superiority over the SoTA methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/nie-lang/UDIS2.
Depth-Supervised Fusion Network for Seamless-Free Image Stitching
College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院）
The seam-driven approach has been proven fairly effective for parallax-tolerant image stitching, whose strategy is to search for an invisible seam from finite representative hypotheses of local alignment. In this paper, we propose a graph-based hypothesis generation and a seam-guided local alignment for improving the effectiveness and the efficiency of the seam-driven approach. The experiment demonstrates the significant reduction of number of hypotheses and the improved quality of naturalness of final stitching results, comparing to the state-of-the-art method SEAGULL.
Parallax-Tolerant Image Stitching with Epipolar Displacement Field
School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）；Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of Complex Systems of Engineering, Ministry of Education（教育部复杂工程系统测量与控制重点实验室）
Parallax-tolerant Image Stitching via Segmentation-guided Multi-homography Warping
College of Information Science and Engineering, Henan University of Technology（河南工业大学信息科学与工程学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Shenzhen University（深圳大学数学科学学院）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Stitching images acquired under perspective projective geometry is a relevant topic in computer vision with multiple applications ranging from smartphone panoramas to the construction of digital maps. Image stitching is an equally prominent challenge in medical imaging, where the limited field-of-view captured by single images prohibits holistic analysis of patient anatomy. The barrier that prevents straight-forward mosaicing of 2D images is depth mismatch due to parallax. In this work, we leverage the Fourier slice theorem to aggregate information from multiple transmission images in parallax…
Image stitching aims at stitching the images taken from different viewpoints into an image with a wider field of view. Existing methods warp the target image to the reference image using the estimated warp function, and a homography is one of the most commonly used warping functions. However, when images have large parallax due to non-planar scenes and translational motion of a camera, the homography cannot fully describe the mapping between two images. Existing approaches based on global or local homography estimation are not free from this problem and suffer from undesired artifacts due to p…
Several approaches to image stitching use different constraints to estimate the motion model between image pairs. These constraints can be roughly divided into two categories: geometric constraints and photometric constraints. In this paper, geometric and photometric constraints are combined to improve the alignment quality, which is based on the observation that these two kinds of constraints are complementary. On the one hand, geometric constraints (e.g., point and line correspondences) are usually spatially biased and are insufficient in some extreme scenes, while photometric constraints ar…
School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Spatially varying warps are increasingly popular for image alignment. In particular, as-projective-as-possible (APAP) warps have been proven effective for accurate panoramic stitching, especially in cases with significant depth parallax that defeat standard homographic warps. However, estimating spatially varying warps requires a sufficient number of feature matches. In image regions where feature detection or matching fail, the warp loses guidance and is unable to accurately model the true underlying warp, thus resulting in poor registration. In this paper, we propose a correspondence inserti…
In this paper, we derive a new differential homography that can account for the scanline-varying camera poses in Rolling Shutter (RS) cameras, and demonstrate its application to carry out RS-aware image stitching and rectification at one stroke. Despite the high complexity of RS geometry, we focus in this paper on a special yet common input -- two consecutive frames from a video stream, wherein the inter-frame motion is restricted from being arbitrarily large. This allows us to adopt simpler differential motion model, leading to a straightforward and practical minimal solver. To deal with non-…
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University（武汉大学测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室）
Image stitching algorithms often adopt the global transformation, such as homography, and work well for planar scenes or parallax free camera motions. However, these conditions are easily violated in practice. With casual camera motions, variable taken views, large depth change, or complex structures, it is a challenging task for stitching these images. The global transformation model often provides dreadful stitching results, such as misalignments or projective distortions, especially perspective distortion. To this end, we suggest a perspective-preserving warping for image stitching, which s…
Key Laboratory of Grain Information Processing（粮食信息处理关键实验室）；Control(Henan University of Technology), Ministry of Education（控制（河南工业大学），教育部）；College of Information Science（信息科学学院）；Engineering, Henan University of Technology（工程，河南工业大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Shenzhen University（数学科学学院，深圳大学）；Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（广东智能信息处理重点实验室）
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In this paper, we propose a panorama stitching algorithm based on asymmetric bidirectional optical flow. This algorithm expects multiple photos captured by fisheye lens cameras as input, and then, through the proposed algorithm, these photos can be merged into a high-quality 360-degree spherical panoramic image. For photos taken from a distant perspective, the parallax among them is relatively small, and the obtained panoramic image can be nearly seamless and undistorted. For photos taken from a close perspective or with a relatively large parallax, a seamless though partially distorted panora…
Panorama creation is one of the most widely deployed techniques in computer vision. In addition to industry applications such as Google Street View, it is also used by millions of consumers in smartphones and other cameras. Traditionally, the problem is decomposed into three phases: registration, which picks a single transformation of each source image to align it to the other inputs, seam finding, which selects a source image for each pixel in the final result, and blending, which fixes minor visual artifacts. Here, we observe that the use of a single registration often leads to errors, espec…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Homography estimation is an important task in computer vision applications, such as image stitching, video stabilization, and camera calibration. Traditional homography estimation methods heavily depend on the quantity and distribution of feature correspondences, leading to poor robustness in low-texture scenes. The learning solutions, on the contrary, try to learn robust deep features but demonstrate unsatisfying performance in the scenes with low overlap rates. In this paper, we address these two problems simultaneously by designing a contextual correlation layer (CCL). The CCL can efficient…
