Image mosaicing using local optical flow registration

Cylindrical panoramic mosaics can be created by aligning and stitching images from a series, captured by a camera rotating around its optical center. The transformation between two images must then be found. Existing methods compute a global transformation for the whole image starting from pixels in the overlapping region. This global transformation, due to local distortions often results in ghost problems in the overlapping region which have to be handled with some deghosting algorithm. This paper proposes to directly use optical flow in order to find a pixelwise registration in the overlapping region, reducing ghost problems. The optical flow is computed using a multiresolution computational algebraic topology approach.