Building large image mosaics with invisible seam-lines

Building image mosaics is interesting to make a wide or a panoramic view from a set of small views, or to cover a large area with aerial images, for instance for cartography purposes or scene simulation. The images used in this experiment are overlapping enough to ensure a robust match, and the geometric transformation between images corresponds to an homographic transformation. As the mosaic will be interpreted, it must be geometrically reliable and must present no radiometric artifact. The homographic transformation between two overlapping images is initialized using the viewing parameters, or using a small set of corresponding points. To improve this first estimation, an original inter-image matching method is used. Radiometric correction is also done by comparing images on the overlap area. The mosaic is built by pasting images successively. Smoothing the intensity values near the seam-line is classically used to mask discontinuities, but that implies radiometric modifications which can lead to false interpretations. To solve this problem, especially if differences in the overlap area are still important after both corrections, a search for the most invisible seam-line is performed with a dynamic programming algorithm.