Simultaneous homographic and comparametric alignment of multiple exposure-adjusted pictures of the same scene

An approach is presented that can simultaneously align multiple exposure-adjusted pictures of the same scene both in their spatial coordinates as well as in their pixel values. The approach is featureless and produces an image mosaic at a common spatial and exposure reference and also addresses the misalignment problem common to methods that compose mosaics from only pair-wise registered image pairs. The objective function considered minimizes the sum of the collective variance over pixels of a global coordinate grid on which to create the final image. The models employed relate images spatially by homographic transformations and tonally by comparametric functions. The importance of performing joint spatial and tonal registration on exposure-adjusted images is emphasized by providing two examples in which spatial-only registration fails. A discussion describing the performance between pair-wise and simultaneous registration under both spatial-only and joint registration procedures is provided.