Deep Seam Prediction for Image Stitching Based on Selection Consistency Loss

Image stitching is to construct panoramic images with wider field of vision (FOV) from some images captured from different viewing positions. To solve the problem of fusion ghosting in the stitched image, seam-driven methods avoid the misalignment area to fuse images by predicting the best seam. Currently, as standard tools of the OpenCV library, dynamic programming (DP) and GraphCut (GC) are still the only commonly used seam prediction methods despite the fact that they were both proposed two decades ago. However, GC can get excellent seam quality but poor real-time performance while DP method has good efficiency but poor seam quality. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based seam prediction method (DSeam) for the sake of high seam quality with high efficiency. To overcome the difficulty of the seam description in network and no GroundTruth for training we design a selective consistency loss combining the seam shape constraint and seam quality constraint to supervise the network learning. By the constraint of the selection of consistency loss, we implicitly defined the mask boundaries as seams and transform seam prediction into mask prediction. To our knowledge, the proposed DSeam is the first deep learning based seam prediction method for image stitching. Extensive experimental results well demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed Dseam method which is 15 times faster than the classic GC seam prediction method in OpenCV 2.4.9 with similar seam quality.