Efficiently registering video into panoramic mosaics

We present an automatic and efficient method to register and stitch thousands of video frames into a large panoramic mosaic. Our method preserves the robustness and accuracy of image stitchers that match all pairs of images while utilizing the ordering information provided by video. We reduce the cost of searching for matches between video frames by adaptively identifying key frames based on the amount of image-to-image overlap. Key frames are matched to all other key frames, but intermediate video frames are only matched to temporally neighboring key frames and intermediate frames. Image orientations can be estimated from this sparse set of matches in time quadratic to cubic in the number of key frames but only linear in the number of intermediate frames. Additionally, the matches between pairs of images are compressed by replacing measurements within small windows in the image with a single representative measurement. We show that this approach substantially reduces the time required to estimate the image orientations with minimal loss of accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate both the efficiency and quality of our results by registering several long video sequences