Mosaics of Scenes with Moving Objects

Image mosaics are useful for a variety of tasks in vision and computer graphics. A particularly convenient way to generate mosaics is by ‘stitching’ together many ordinary photographs. Existing algorithms focus on capturing static scenes. This paper presents a complete system for creating visually pleasing mosaics in the presence of moving objects. There are three primary contributions. The first component of our system is a registration method that remains unbiased by movement— the Mellin transform is extended to register images related by a projective transform. Second, an efficient method for finding a globally consistent registration of all images is developed. By solving a linear system of equations, derived from many pairwise registration matrices, we find an optimal global registration. Lastly, a new method of compositing images is presented. Blurred areas due to moving objects are avoided by segmenting the mosaic into disjoint regions and sampling pixels in each region from a single source image.