A variational approach for image stitching I

The main aim of this paper is to develop an algorithm for image stitching. Our idea is to propose a variational approach containing an energy functional to determine both a weighting mask function and a stitched image together. The existence of a solution of the proposed energy functional is shown. We present an alternating minimizing algorithm to solve the proposed model numerically, and we show the convergence of the algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed model works very well. We also consider a novel color correction procedure to enhance the visual quality of stitched images where source images have different lighting conditions.