Fast panorama stitching for high-quality panoramic images on mobile phones

This paper addresses the problem of creating high-resolution and high-quality panoramic images from long image sequences with very different colors and luminance in source images. A fast stitching approach is proposed for combining a set of source images into a panoramic image using little memory, and implemented on mobile phones. In this approach, color correction reduces color differences of source images and balances colors and luminance in the whole image sequence, dynamic programming finds optimal seams in overlapping areas between adjacent images and merges them together, and image blending further smoothens color transitions and hides visible seams and stitching artifacts. A sequential panorama stitching procedure constructs panoramic images. The advantages include fast processing speed using dynamic programming for optimal seam finding, reducing memory needs by using the sequential panorama stitching, and improved quality of image labeling and blending due to the use of color correction. The approach has been tested with different image sequences and it works well on both indoor and outdoor scenes.