Homography-based image mosaicing for automatically removing partial foreground objects

Image mosaicing is an effective means of constructing a single panoramic image from a series of snapshots taken in different viewing angles. However, in the case of congested traffic scenes with a cluttered environment including vehicles or pedestrians, there are severe difficulties in aligning a pair of snapshots. In such cases, some objects would be taken only in one of the image pair, thereby resulting in failure in stitching the pair of images. This paper deals with three types of techniques for performing an image mosaicing: Homography estimation for determining geometrical relationships between the image pair, expectation-maximization algorithm for removing inconsistent overlapping region, and graph cuts for seamless stitching and background estimation. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique is effective to synthesize a panoramic image from a series of narrow-field-of-view snapshots.