A new method to find an optimal warping function in image stitching

In image stitching applications, it is very important to find a suitable warping function for the visual quality of a composite (stitching result). In this paper, we present a new mathematical criterion to select an optimal warping function among a set of possible candidates (e.g., parametric family). The proposed criterion can be considered as a direct view condition for image stitching , i.e., it is desirable that each part of the composite image looks like its corresponding input image. More specifically, we do not use an explicit modeling of a compositing surface, but, we focus on the differential properties of a warping function. That is we design a cost function so that the Jacobian matrix of a warping function is close to a shape preserving matrix such as rotation and reflection matrices. The proposed cost function can be effectively minimized by using Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed method results in visually pleasing stitched results because the original shape of each image is preserved in the composite.