Image Stitching Techniques Applied to Plane or 3-D Models: A Review

Image stitching is a technique in which multiple overlapping images of the scene are stitched together to generate an image with a wide view and high resolution. Image stitching methods can be broadly classified into feature-based and deep learning methods. Feature-based methods use manually designed features to establish transformation relationships between multiple images. This technology has played an important role in medical, industrial, military, and other fields. With the rise of deep learning in computer vision, it has also become the mainstream method in the field of image stitching. This article provides a systematic literature review of image stitching techniques applied on the plane and 3-D models for both feature-based and deep learning methods. We divide the stitching methods into two categories, namely, mosaic stitching methods for generating stitched plane images and panoramic stitching methods for generating stitched panoramic images. Based on the camera type, it is further divided into pinhole camera plane stitching methods, pinhole camera panoramic stitching methods, fisheye camera panoramic stitching methods, and light field camera plane stitching methods. An extensive search was conducted in International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), and ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics (SIGGRAFH) to summarize related image stitching techniques; 89 articles are selected for systematic literature review and are presented in the table. The objective of this systematic literature review is to provide detailed technical progress in image stitching techniques and identify the research gap in this field.