@inproceedings{
xieziqi2024reconstructing,
title={Reconstructing the Image Stitching Pipeline: Integrating Fusion and Rectangling into a Unified Inpainting Model},
author={Xieziqi and Weidong Zhao and XianhuiLiu and Jian Zhao and Ning Jia},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=ZViYPzh9Wq}
}
Deep learning-based image stitching pipelines are typically divided into three cascading stages: registration, fusion, and rectangling. Each stage requires its own network training and is tightly coupled to the others, leading to error propagation and posing significant challenges to parameter tuning and system stability. This paper proposes the Simple and Robust Stitcher (SRStitcher), which 
revolutionizes the image stitching pipeline by simplifying the fusion and rectangling stages into a unified inpainting model, requiring no model training or fine-tuning. We reformulate the problem definitions of the fusion and rectangling stages and demonstrate that they can be effectively integrated into an inpainting task. Furthermore, we design the weighted masks to guide the reverse process in a pre-trained large-scale diffusion model, implementing this integrated inpainting task in a single inference. Through extensive experimentation, we verify the interpretability and generalization capabilities of this unified model, demonstrating that SRStitcher outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both performance and stability.
Reconstructing the Image Stitching Pipeline: Integrating Fusion and Rectangling into a Unified Inpainting Model
Xieziqi Weidong Zhao XianhuiLiu Jian Zhao Ning Jia