Creating panoramas on mobile phones

Image stitching is used to combine several images into one wide-angled mosaic image. Traditionally mosaic images have been constructed from a few separate photographs, but nowadays that video recording has become commonplace even on mobile phones, it is possible to consider also video sequences as a source for mosaic images. However, most stitching methods require vast amounts of computational resources that make them unusable on mobile devices. We present a novel panorama stitching method that is designed to create high-quality image mosaics from both video clips and separate images even on low-resource devices. The software is able to create both 360 degree panoramas and perspective-corrected mosaics. Features of the software include among others: detection of moving objects, inter-frame color balancing and rotation correction. The application selects only the frames of highest quality for the final mosaic image. Low-quality frames are dropped on the fly while recording the frames for the mosaic. The complete software is implemented on Matlab, but also a mobile phone version exists. We present a complete solution from frame acquisition to panorama output with different resource profiles that suit various platforms.