Warping Residual Based Image Stitching for Large Parallax

Image stitching techniques align two images captured at different viewing positions onto a single wider image. When the captured 3D scene is not planar and the camera baseline is large, two images exhibit parallax where the relative positions of scene structures are quite different from each view. The existing image stitching methods often fail to work on the images with large parallax. In this paper, we propose an image stitching algorithm robust to large parallax based on the novel concept of warping residuals. We first estimate multiple homographies and find their inlier feature matches between two images. Then we evaluate warping residual for each feature match with respect to the multiple homographies. To alleviate the parallax artifacts, we partition input images into superpixels and warp each superpixel adaptively according to an optimal homography which is computed by minimizing the error of feature matches weighted by the warping residuals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides accurate stitching results for images with large parallax, and outperforms the existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively.