My aim is to stitch 1-2 thousand images together. I find the key points in all the images, then I find the matches between them. Next, I find the homography between the two images. I also take into account the current homography and all the previous homographies. Finally, I warp the images based on combined homography. (My code is written in python 2.7)
The issue I am facing is that when I overlay the warped images, they become extremely bright. The reason is that most of the area between two consecutive images is common/overalapping. So, when I overlay them, the intensities of the common areas increase by a factor of 2 and as more and more images are overalid the moew bright the values become and eventually I get a matrix where all the pixels have the value of 255.
Can I do something to adjust the brightness after every image I overlay?
I am combining/overlaying the images via open cv function named cv.addWeighted()
dst = cv.addWeighted( src1, alpha, src2, beta, gamma)
here, I am taking alpha and beta = 1
dst = cv.addWeighted( image1, 1, image2, 1, 0)
I also tried decreasing the value of alpha and beta but here a problem comes that, when around 100 images have been overlaid, the first ones start to vanish probably because the intensity of those images became zero after being multiplied by 0.5 at every iteration. The function looked as follows. Here, I also set the gamma as 5:
dst = cv.addWeighted( image1, 0.5, image2, 0.5, 5)
Can someone please help how can I solve the problem of images getting extremely bright (when aplha = beta = 1) or images vanishing after a certain point (when alpha and beta are both around 0.5).
This is the code where I am overlaying the images:
for i in range(0, len(allWarpedImages)):
for j in range(1, len(allWarpedImages[i])):
allWarpedImages[i][0] = cv2.addWeighted(allWarpedImages[i][0], 1, allWarpedImages[i][j], 1, 0)
images.append(allWarpedImages[i][0])
cv2.imwrite('/root/Desktop/thesis' + 'final.png', images[0])
When you stitch two images, the pixel values of overlapping part do not just add up. Ideally, two matching pixels should have the same value (a spot in the first image should also has the same value in the second image), so you simply keep one value.
In reality, two matching pixels may have slightly different pixel value, you may simply average them out. Better still, you adjust their exposure level to match each other before stitching.
For many images to be stitched together, you will need to adjust all of their exposure level to match. To equalize their exposure level is a rather big topic, please read about "histogram equalization" if you are not familiar with it yet.
Also, it is very possible that there is high contrast across that many images, so you may need to make your stitched image an HDR (high dynamic range) image, to prevent pixel value overflow/underflow.