This paper presents a technique to automatically stitch multiple images at varying orientations and exposures to create a composite panorama that preserves the angular extent and dynamic range of the inputs. The main contribution of our method is that it allows for large exposure differences, large scene motion or other misregistrations between frames and requires no extra camera hardware. To do this, we introduce a two-step graph cut approach. The purpose of the first step is to fix the positions of moving objects in the scene. In the second step, we fill in the entire available dynamic range. We introduce data costs that encourage consistency and higher signal-to-noise ratios, and seam costs that encourage smooth transitions. Our method is simple to implement and effective. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several input sets with varying exposures and camera orientations.

As panoramic photography becomes increasingly popular, there is a greater need for high-quality software to automatically create panoramic images. Existing algorithms either produce a rough "stitch" that cannot deal with common artifacts, or require user input. This paper presents methods for dealing with two artifacts that often occur in practice. Our first contribution is a method for dealing with objects that move between different views of a dynamic scene. If such moving objects are left in, they will appear blurry and "ghosted". Treating such regions as nodes in a graph, we use a vertex cover algorithm to selectively remove all but one instance of each object. Our second contribution is a method for continuously adjusting exposure across multiple images in order to eliminate visible shifts in brightness or hue. We compute exposure corrections on a block-by block basis, then smoothly interpolate the parameters using a spline to get spatially continuous exposure adjustment. Our enhancements, combined with previously published techniques for automatic image stitching, result in a high-quality automated stitcher that exhibits far fewer artifacts than existing software.