Guided color consistency optimization for image mosaicking

This paper studies the problem of color consistency correction for sequential images with diverse color characteristics. Existing algorithms try to adjust all images to minimize color differences among images under a unified energy framework, however, the results are prone to presenting a consistent but unnatural appearance when the color difference between images is large and diverse. In our approach, this problem is addressed effectively by providing a guided initial solution for the global consistency optimization, which avoids converging to a meaningless integrated solution. First of all, to obtain the reliable intensity correspondences in overlapping regions between image pairs, we creatively propose the histogram extreme point matching algorithm which is robust to image geometrical misalignment to some extents. In the absence of the extra reference information, the guided initial solution is learned from the major tone of the original images by searching some image subset as the reference, whose color characteristics will be transferred to the others via the paths of graph analysis. Thus, the final results via global adjustment will take on a consistent color similar to the appearance of the reference image subset. Several groups of convincing experiments on both the synthetic dataset and the challenging real ones sufficiently demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve as good or even better results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.