Image stitching with dynamic elements

This paper presents a new combination of techniques to create pleasing and physically consistent image mosaics despite the presence of moving objects in the scene. The technique uses heuristic seam selection in the intensity and gradient-domains to choose which pixels to use from each image and then blends them smoothly to create the final mosaic. We demonstrate illustrative results obtained by comparing and contrasting our output with that obtained from four representative existing image mosaic systems. One of these is documented in the academic research literature and three are commercially available products. The present algorithm gives comparable or superior results in all examples. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.