Real-Time Image Mosaicing Using Non-rigid Registration

• Published in: Advances in Image and Video Technology Vol. 7087; pp. 311 - 322
• Main Authors: Castanheira de Souza, Rafael Henrique, Okutomi, Masatoshi, Torii, Akihiko
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Springer Berlin / Heidelberg 2011; Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: feature based; mosaic; non-rigid; real-time; registration
• ISBN: 9783642253669; 3642253660
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-25367-6_28

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.