Patent ID: 7236646

Claim:
A method for tonally balancing a set of overlapping images, comprising: using a subset of corresponding points in each of a plurality of image overlap regions to solve a set of minimization equations for gains and biases for each spectral band of each image, the corresponding points being points from different images having locations that correspond to each other, the subset of corresponding points consisting of corresponding points whose intensities differ less than a threshold; applying the gains and biases to the images; iterating said using and applying actions for a predetermined number of iterations, said iterating resulting in an iterated gain and an iterated bias for each spectral band of each image; transforming intensities of points for each spectral band in each image using the iterated gain and the iterated bias for the corresponding spectral band to produce transformed intensities of points; and producing a tonally balanced image mosaic by using the transformed intensities of points in said images.