Performance evaluation of color correction approaches for automatic multi-view image and video stitching

Many different automatic color correction approaches have been proposed by different research communities in the past decade. However, these approaches are seldom compared, so their relative performance and applicability are unclear. For multi-view image and video stitching applications, an ideal color correction approach should be effective at transferring the color palette of the source image to the target image, and meanwhile be able to extend the transferred color from the overlapped area to the full target image without creating visual artifacts. In this paper we evaluate the performance of color correction approaches for automatic multi-view image and video stitching. We consider nine color correction algorithms from the literature applied to 40 synthetic image pairs and 30 real mosaic image pairs selected from different applications. Experimental results show that both parametric and non-parametric approaches have members that are effective at transferring colors, while parametric approaches are generally better than non-parametric approaches in extendability.