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Abstract

The invention is a patched based alignment method and apparatus which aligns a set of overlapping images to construct a mosaic image. The images are aligned by first finding an incremental deformation of one image relative to a 3-dimensional coordinate system tending to reduce registration error between overlapping portions of the pair of images, and then warping the one image in accordance with the incremental deformation. The incremental defornation is found by computing a difference error vector between the pair of images. First, the one image is divided into plural patches. Within each patch, gradients are computed at pixels within the patch and a single Jacobian is computed for the entire patch. The Jacobian is the Jacoian of a coordinate system of the one image with respect to the incremental deformation. The gradients are combined with the Jacobian to produce a matrix for the patch. The gradients are separately combined with the error vector and with the Jacobian to produce a residual for the patch. The matrix is summed over plural patches and the residual is also summed over plural patches to produce Hessians and residuals, respectively. Normal equations are defined with the residuals and Hessians and are solved to provide the desired incremental deformation.

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First Claim