Fast vignetting correction and color matching for panoramic image stitching

When images are stitched together to form a panorama there is often color mismatch between the source images due to vignetting and differences in exposure and white balance between images. In this paper a low complexity method is proposed to correct vignetting and differences in color between images, producing panoramas that look consistent across all source images. Unlike most previous methods which require complex non-linear optimization to solve for correction parameters, our method requires only linear regressions with a low number of parameters, resulting in a fast, computationally efficient method. Experimental results show the proposed method effectively removes vignetting effects and produces images that are highly visually consistent in color and brightness.