Eliminating ghosting and exposure artifacts in image mosaics

As panoramic photography becomes increasingly popular, there is a greater need for high-quality software to automatically create panoramic images. Existing algorithms either produce a rough "stitch" that cannot deal with common artifacts, or require user input. This paper presents methods for dealing with two artifacts that often occur in practice. Our first contribution is a method for dealing with objects that move between different views of a dynamic scene. If such moving objects are left in, they will appear blurry and "ghosted". Treating such regions as nodes in a graph, we use a vertex cover algorithm to selectively remove all but one instance of each object. Our second contribution is a method for continuously adjusting exposure across multiple images in order to eliminate visible shifts in brightness or hue. We compute exposure corrections on a block-by block basis, then smoothly interpolate the parameters using a spline to get spatially continuous exposure adjustment. Our enhancements, combined with previously published techniques for automatic image stitching, result in a high-quality automated stitcher that exhibits far fewer artifacts than existing software.