METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING LOCAL TO GLOBAL MULTIFRAME ALIGNMENT TO CONSTRUCT MOSAIC IMAGES

A method and apparatus that determines the topology of a sequence of images and then globally aligns the images with respect to each image's neighboring images. The apparatus includes a topology determination module, a local coarse registration module, a local fine registration module, a global consistency module, and a color matching/blending module. To accurately render a mosaic image from a sequence of images the topology determination and global alignment processes are iterated to progressively produce accurately aligned images. The apparatus efficiently and accurately combines a plurality of source images into a seamless panoramic mosaic representation of a scene, of arbitrarily wide spatial and angular extent, regardless of the order of image acquisition.