Image stitching with efficient brightness fusion and automatic content awareness

Image Stitching, also be called photo stitching, is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Image stitching is challenging in two fields. First, the sequenced photos taken from various angles will have different brightness. This will certainly lead to a un-nature stitched result with no harmony of brightness. Second, ghosting artifact due to the moving objects is also a common problem and the elimination of it is not an easy task. This paper presents several novel techniques that make the process of addressing the two difficulties significantly less labor-intensive while also efficient. For the brightness problem, each input image is blended by several images with different brightness. For the ghosting problem, we propose an intuitive technique according to a stitching line based on a novel energy map which is essentially a combination of gradient map which indicates the presence of structures and prominence map which determines the attractiveness of a region. The stitching line can easily skirt around the moving objects or salient parts based on the philosophy that human eyes mostly notice only the salient features of an image. We compare result of our method to those of 4 state-of-the-art image stitching methods and it turns out that our method outperforms the 4 methods in removing ghosting artifacts.