Manifold alignment based color transfer for multiview image stitching

In multiview image stitching, color transfer removes all color inconsistences between different views under different illumination conditions and camera settings to make the stitching more seamless or visually acceptable. This paper presents a manifold alignment method to perform color transfer by exploring manifold structures of partially overlapped source and target images. Manifold alignment projects a pair of source and target images into a common embedding space in which not only the local geometries of color distribution in the respective images are preserved, but also the corresponding pixels in overlapped area across two images are pairwise aligned. Under this new space, color transfer can be considered as a matching problem between different manifolds, i.e. the color of each target pixel is replaced by the color of a source pixel that is nearest to this target pixel in this new space. Compared with other techniques in the literature, the proposed method makes full use of both the correspondences in overlapped area and the intrinsic color structures in the whole stitching scene so that a favorable performance is achieved.