CLAIRVOYANCE: A Fast And Robust Precision Mosaicing System for Gigapixel Images

In this paper, we present CLAIRVOYANCE: a fully automatic photomosaicing system for building ultra high-resolution composited images from image sequences captured by tailored in-house motorized active pan-tilt digital camera units. Our stand-alone mobile systems built over the past five years are computationally fast, robust to various datasets and deliver unprecedented consumer-level image quality. We describe our simple yet novel lens calibration and radiometric correction procedures based on a fast block matching algorithm. All of our core image stitching components are based on the 2D Fourier phase correlation principle, and are thus easily amenable to hardware LSI implementation. We validate our approach by presenting sharp photomosaics obtained from a few hundreds up to a few thousands data sets of images