A new simple method to stitch images with lens distortion

Abstract

Lens distortion is one of the main problems that makes it difficult to correctly stitch images. Since the lens distortion cannot be linearly represented, it is hard to define the correspondences between images linearly or directly when the images are stitched. In this paper, we propose an efficient image stitching method for images with various lens distortions. We estimate accurate lens distortion using the ratio of lengths between matching lines in each matched image. The homographies between each matched images are estimated based on the estimated lens distortion. Since our technique works in the RANSAC phase, the additional time to estimate the distortion parameters is very short. Our experimental results show that our proposed method can efficiently and automatically stitch images with arbitrary lens distortion better than other current methods. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.