Improved optimal seam selection blending for fast video stitching of videos captured from freely moving devices

We investigate the problem of stitching timely synchronized video streams captured by freely moving devices. Recently, it was shown that using frame-to-frame correlation can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of video stitching algorithms [19]. In this paper, we address some of the shortcomings in [19], namely the simple blending approach, causing almost a third of stitching errors and the fact that the stitching algorithm is only tested on a frame-by-frame basis which does not realistically mimic the user perception of the output system quality as a complete video. We propose the use of a modified blending technique based on optimal seam selection and experimentally validate its superiority using precision, recall and F₁ measures on a frame-by-frame basis, while maintaining low computational complexity. Furthermore, we validate that the performance gains measured on a frame-by-frame basis are also evident when the stitched video output is evaluated as a single unit.