Efficient Homography Estimation for Panoramic Image Generation

An efficient homography estimation method for large sized images is proposed. Estimating an accurate homography is one of the most important parts in image stitching processes. Since hardwares have been advanced, it has been passible to take higher resolution images. However, computational cost for estimating homography has been also increased. Specifically, when too many features exist in the images, it requires lots of computations to estimate a correct homography. Furthermore, there is a high probability of obtaining an incorrect homography. Therefore, we propose a numerical method to extract the appropriate correspondences from several down-scaled images to estimate and compensate the homography numerically for restoring an original homography. Also, if there is an unbalance in color tone between the reference and the target images, we make them balanced by using local information of the overlapped regions. Experimental results show that proposed method is three times faster in 3.2 mega pixel images, five times faster in 8mega pixel images than the conventional approach. Therefore, we believe that the proposed method can be a useful tool to efficiently estimate a homography.