Patent ID: 7119816

Claim:
A computer-implemented process for converting the contents of a planar object into a high-resolution image, comprising the process actions of: acquiring a sequence of images of portions of a planar object which have been captured in a prescribed pattern and wherein each subsequent image overlaps a previous image in said pattern; extracting points of interest in each image; matching said points of said interest between each pair of successive images wherein the process action of matching said points of said interest between each pair of successive images comprises the process actions of: for each point of interest in the earlier captured image of the pair of images under consideration, establishing a window of pixels centered on the point of interest; for each point of interest, comparing said window in said earlier captured image of the pair under consideration with windows of pixels the same size which are centered on the points of interest in the later-captured image of the pair by computing a zero-mean normalized cross correlation between the windows; and whenever the largest correlation scare computed between the window of the earlier captured image and each of the windows in the later captured image exceeds a prefixed threshold, designating the associated point in the later-captured image as a match candidate for the point under consideration in the earlier-captured image; computing a projective mapping between each pair of successive images in order to determine corresponding pixel locations in the images; and generating a composite image from said sequence of images using said projective mapping.