Image stitching has a wide range of applications in computer vision/graphics and virtual reality. Seam estimation is one of the key steps in image stitching. This step can relieve ghosts and artifacts that were generated by misalignment or moving objects in the overlap region. This paper presents a fast and robust seam estimation method (FARSE) by defining gray-weighted distance and gradient-domain region of differences to avoid visible seams and ghosting. The optimal seam is estimated by searching in two weighted matrices, namely cost matrix and value matrix. The proposed method could be simply implemented. Results indicate that the FARSE method is scale-invariant and it is fast and more robust than the other methods.
