Image Stitching System Based on ORB Feature-Based Technique and Compensation Blending

The construction of a high-resolution panoramic image from a sequence of input overlapping images of the same scene is called image stitching/mosaicing. It is considered as an important, challenging topic in computer vision, multimedia, and computer graphics. The quality of the mosaic image and the time cost are the two primary parameters for measuring the stitching performance. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to introduce a high-quality image stitching system with least computation time. First, we compare many different features detectors. We test Harris corner detector, SIFT, SURF, FAST, GoodFeaturesToTrack, MSER, and ORB techniques to measure the detection rate of the corrected keypoints and processing time. Second, we manipulate the implementation of different common categories of image blending methods to increase the quality of the stitching process. From experimental results, we conclude that ORB algorithm is the fastest, more accurate, and with higher performance. In addition, Exposure Compensation is the highest stitching quality blending method. Finally, we have generated an image stitching system based on ORB using Exposure Compensation blending method. Keywords—Image stitching; Image mosaicking; Feature-based approaches; Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT); Speed-up Robust Feature detector (SURF); Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB); Exposure Compensation blending