CSE576 (Spring 2005) Project 2

Harsha V. Madhyastha

Objective: Implement spherical warping, aligning and blending to enable stitching together of panoramas.

Note: If the panoramas on this page are not viewable, this page is also mirrored at here

Using the simple window descriptor as the feature vector worked pretty well for both the test sequence as well as with the pictures shot with the Kaida head. However, stitching together the hand-held sequence turned out to be much more cumbersome. I ended up using the SIFT feature descriptor for this sequence, and yet, as can be seen above, the panorama did not come out all that well.
Initially, my blending produced some ghost-like effects near the top and bottom edges in regions where two images overlap. This was due to the curved edges that the spherically-warped images have, due to which the edges of neighboring images do not overlay perfectly. For this, I first used the work-around that for any point at which the color is black, I would neither add to the weight nor to the weighted sum of pixel colors. Later, I learnt that the alpha channel was set to 0 in the region outside the warped image. So, in my final implementation, I neglect points with alpha channel set to 0 while blending.
This project also helped me go back to the first project and fine-tune the parameters I had used. Hopefully this will turn out to be useful for the third project.