A method for manipulating moving objects in panoramic image stitching

Abstract

Detection of moving object and creating well-aligned image mosaics are a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new approach for creating visually appealing and correctly stitched image panoramas in the presence of moving objects in the scene. Our main contributions are followings. The first component of our method is to find precise overlap region between images by using correctly matched feature points information after discarding outliers. Second main component is to check the existence of moving objects in the found overlap region. In order to detect moving objects in the overlapping regions, firstly, we find the absolute difference of overlap regions by subtracting overlaps, afterwards, the squares of the subtracted image pixels are calculated, thresholding operation is applied to the obtained image. Hence, median filtering is employed to remove noise from the derived binary image. Following that, we check the existence of moving object; afterwards, binary image masking is applied to the overlap region for extracting the moving object pixels or background scene pixels. Subsequently, obtained region pixels are placed on the other image using inverse hommography to make the overlap region same in both stitched images. As a result, the overlap region of images becomes same with the same object or background region for the movement of the object. Finally, we apply the blending operation to achieve seamless result. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is able to produce correct panorama images for moving objects and it is very effective on mobile phones in terms of speed and quality as compared to other existing methods. © 2017 IEEE.