Cross Correlation versus Mutual Information for Image Mosaicing

This paper reviews the concept of image mosaicking and presents a comparison between two of the most common image mosaicing techniques. The first technique is based on normalized cross correlation (NCC) for registering overlapping 2D images of a 3D scene. The second is based on mutual information (MI). The experimental results demonstrate that the two techniques have a similar performance in most cases but there are some interesting differences. The choice of a distinctive template is critical when working with NCC. On the other hand, when using MI, the registration procedure was able to provide acceptable performance even without distinctive templates. But generally the performance when using MI with large rotation angles was not accurate as with NCC. Keywords—mosaicing; normalized cross correlation; mutual information