Image alignment for panorama stitching in sparsely structured environments

Abstract

Panorama stitching of sparsely structured scenes is an open research problem. In this setting, feature-based image alignment methods often fail due to shortage of distinct image features. Instead, direct image alignment methods, such as those based on phase correlation, can be applied. In this paper we investigate correlation-based image alignment techniques for panorama stitching of sparsely structured scenes. We propose a novel image alignment approach based on discriminative correlation filters (DCF), which has recently been successfully applied to visual tracking. Two versions of the proposed DCF-based approach are evaluated on two real and one synthetic panorama dataset of sparsely structured indoor environments. All three datasets consist of images taken on a tripod rotating 360 degrees around the vertical axis through the optical center. We show that the proposed DCF-based methods outperform phase correlation-based approaches on these datasets.