Abstract

This paper presents an automatic robust system which relies only on the information contained within the original images for the construction of massive composite mosaic images from close-range and high-resolution originals, such as those obtained when imaging architectural and heritage structures. We first apply the Harris Corner Detector to extract a selection of corners and, then, employ both the intensity correlation and the spatial correlation between the corresponding corners for matching them. We estimate the lens distortion parameter and the eight-parameter planar projective transformation matrix via the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. After the pairwise registration stage, we used a global optimization strategy, solving a linear system of equations to produce a globally consistent alignment of the entire set of original images. Lastly, image fusion using a weighted blending function together with intensity compensation produces an effective seamless mosaic image. Comparisons with current commercial image-mosaic software are favourable.