Tone correction with dynamic objects for seamless image mosaic

Abstract

This paper presents a tone compensation method between images to make a seamless panoramic image. Different camera settings of input images, including white-balance, exposure time, and f-stops, affect the overall color tone of a resultant panoramic image. Although numerous methods have been proposed to deal with such color variations for seamless image stitching, most of them do not properly consider the dynamic scene in which different scene contents exist in input images. In this paper, we propose an efficient method that takes dynamic scene contents into account for compensating color tone difference. The proposed approach consists of three steps. First, we compensate the color tone difference by using the linear color transform with robust local features. Second, we filter out dynamic objects (i.e., dynamic scene contents) by measuring similarity between the linear transformed image and the reference image. Finally, we precisely correct the color variation with detected consistent regions only. The qualitative evaluation shows superior or competitive results compared to commercially available products. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.