Key frames selection into panoramic mosaics

A video sequence consists of several hundred frames and as a result creating a panoramic image from these frames is a very time consuming process. Consecutive frames have large overlap areas which do not provide much information. Therefore, some key frames must be extracted for better performance. There are a number of methods for key frame selection, which match all frames in a video sequence. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient method to select key frames from video for creating a large panoramic mosaic without matching all frames. A Kalman filter is used to predict the overlap area between each frame and its previous key frame. It predicts the trajectory of each frame corner to estimate its position in a common mosaic surface. It is shown that this approach substantially reduces the time required to construct panorama from a video sequence.