Image Stitching Based on Nonrigid Warping for Urban Scene

Image stitching based on a global alignment model is widely used in computer vision. However, the resulting stitched image may look blurry or ghosted due to parallax. To solve this problem, we propose a parallax-tolerant image stitching method based on nonrigid warping in this paper. Given a group of putative feature correspondences between overlapping images, we first use a semiparametric function fitting, which introduces a motion coherence constraint to remove outliers. Then, the input images are warped according to a nonrigid warp model based on Gaussian radial basis functions. The nonrigid warping is a kind of elastic deformation that is flexible and smooth enough to eliminate moderate parallax errors. This leads to high-precision alignment in the overlapped region. For the nonoverlapping region, we use a rigid similarity model to reduce distortion. Through effective transition, the nonrigid warping of the overlapped region and the rigid warping of the nonoverlapping region can be used jointly. Our method can obtain more accurate local alignment while maintaining the overall shape of the image. Experimental results on several challenging data sets for urban scene show that the proposed approach is better than state-of-the-art approaches in both qualitative and quantitative indicators.