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）
Image stitching with parallax is still a challenging task. Existing methods often struggle to maintain both the local and global structures of the image while reducing alignment artifacts and warping distortions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that utilizes epipolar geometry to establish a warping technique based on the epipolar displacement field. Initially, the warping rule for pixels in the epipolar geometry is established through the infinite homography. Subsequently, the epipolar displacement field, which represents the sliding distance of the warped pixel along the epipolar line, is formulated by thin-plate splines based on the principle of local elastic deformation. The stitching result can be generated by inversely warping the pixels according to the epipolar displacement field. This method incorporates the epipolar constraints in the warping rule, which ensures high-quality alignment and maintains the projectivity of the panorama. Qualitative and quantitative comparative experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed method for stitching images with large parallax.
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 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…
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）
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）
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…
College of Electronic Science and Technology, Nation University of Defense Technology (NUDT)（国防科技大学电子科学学院）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）
Stereo image pairs encode 3D scene cues into stereo correspondences between the left and right images. To exploit 3D cues within stereo images, recent CNN based methods commonly use cost volume techniques to capture stereo correspondence over large disparities. However, since disparities can vary significantly for stereo cameras with different baselines, focal lengths and resolutions, the fixed maximum disparity used in cost volume techniques hinders them to handle different stereo image pairs with large disparity variations. In this paper, we propose a generic parallax-attention mechanism (PA…
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…
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…
Although recent years have witnessed the great advances in stereo image super-resolution (SR), the beneficial information provided by binocular systems has not been fully used. Since stereo images are highly symmetric under epipolar constraint, in this paper, we improve the performance of stereo image SR by exploiting symmetry cues in stereo image pairs. Specifically, we propose a symmetric bi-directional parallax attention module (biPAM) and an inline occlusion handling scheme to effectively interact cross-view information. Then, we design a Siamese network equipped with a biPAM to super-reso…
College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, China（国防科技大学电子科学与技术学院）；National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Blind Signal Processing, China（中国盲信号处理国防科技重点实验室）
Stereo image pairs can be used to improve the performance of super-resolution (SR) since additional information is provided from a second viewpoint. However, it is challenging to incorporate this information for SR since disparities between stereo images vary significantly. In this paper, we propose a parallax-attention stereo superresolution network (PASSRnet) to integrate the information from a stereo image pair for SR. Specifically, we introduce a parallax-attention mechanism with a global receptive field along the epipolar line to handle different stereo images with large disparity variati…
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…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Huawei Technologies Company Limited（华为技术有限公司）
This paper presents a learning-based approach to synthesize the view from an arbitrary camera position given a sparse set of images. A key challenge for this novel view synthesis arises from the reconstruction process, when the views from different input images may not be consistent due to obstruction in the light path. We overcome this by jointly modeling the epipolar property and occlusion in designing a convolutional neural network. We start by defining and computing the aperture disparity map, which approximates the parallax and measures the pixel-wise shift between two views. While this r…
