Automatic selection of color reference image for panoramic stitching

Color correction is an important step in the generation of high-resolution stitched panoramas. Typically, color correction schemes try to match the color of each image in the panorama to an arbitrarily selected reference image. We provide a scheme that uses quantitative metrics such as image contrast, gradient-based structure similarity index measure (G-SSIM) and color clipping information to automatically select the best reference that results in visually pleasing output panoramas. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the scheme show encouraging results for panoramic images as well as for stitched videos. The scheme acts as a pre-processing step to color correction and its applicability to both parametric and non-parametric global color correction schemes has also been demonstrated.