A fast algorithm for material image sequential stitching

In material research, it is often highly desirable to observe images of whole microscopic sections with high resolution. So that micrograph stitching is an important technology to produce a panorama or larger image by combining multiple images with overlapping areas, while retaining microscopic resolution. However, due to high complexity and variety of microstructure, most traditional methods could not balance speed and accuracy of stitching strategy. To overcome this problem, we develop a method named very fast sequential micrograph stitching (VFSMS), which employ incremental searching strategy and GPU acceleration to guarantee the accuracy and the speed of stitching results. Experimental results demonstrate that the VFSMS achieve state-of-art performance on three types’ microscopic datasets on both accuracy and speed aspects. Besides, it significantly outperforms the most famous and commonly used software, such as ImageJ, Photoshop and Autostitch. The software is available at https://www.mgedata.cn/app_entrance/microscope .