An Unordered Image Stitching Method Based on Binary Tree and Estimated Overlapping Area

Aiming at the complex computation and time-consuming problem during unordered image stitching, we present a method based on the binary tree and the estimated overlapping areas to stitch images without order in this paper. For image registration, the overlapping areas between input images are estimated, so that the extraction and matching of feature points are only performed in these areas. For image stitching, we build a model of the binary tree to stitch each two matched images without sorting. Compared to traditional methods, our method significantly reduces the computational time of matching irrelevant image pairs and improves the efficiency of image registration and stitching. Moreover, the stitching model of the binary tree proposed in this paper further reduces the distortion of the panorama. Experimental results show that the number of extracted feature points in the estimated overlapping area is approximately 0.3~0.6 times of that in the entire image by using the same method, which greatly reduces the computational time of feature extraction and matching. Compared to the exhaustive image matching method, our approach only takes about 1/3 of the time to find all matching images.