So far as I know, there is no means to provide additional data to the OpenCV engine beyond just giving it a list of images. It does a pretty good job on its own though. I would check out some of the example code, and test how long each stitching operation takes. From my experiments using 4x6, 4x8, ..., 4x20 panoramic reconstructions, the CPU time required seems to increase with the number of overlapping images. I would imagine your case would require at least a minute to compute on a modern machine.
Source:
https://code.ros.org/trac/opencv/browser/trunk/opencv/samples/cpp/stitching.cpp?rev=6682
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42
43 // We follow to these papers:
44 // 1) Construction of panoramic mosaics with global and local alignment.
45 // Heung-Yeung Shum and Richard Szeliski. 2000.
46 // 2) Eliminating Ghosting and Exposure Artifacts in Image Mosaics.
47 // Matthew Uyttendaele, Ashley Eden and Richard Szeliski. 2001.
48 // 3) Automatic Panoramic Image Stitching using Invariant Features.
49 // Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe. 2007.
50
51 #include <iostream>
52 #include <fstream>
53 #include "opencv2/highgui/highgui.hpp"
54 #include "opencv2/stitching/stitcher.hpp"
55
56 using namespace std;
57 using namespace cv;
58
59 void printUsage()
60 {
61 cout <<
62 "Rotation model images stitcher.\n\n"
63 "stitching img1 img2 [...imgN]\n\n"
64 "Flags:\n"
65 " --try_use_gpu (yes|no)\n"
66 " Try to use GPU. The default value is 'no'. All default values\n"
67 " are for CPU mode.\n"
68 " --output <result_img>\n"
69 " The default is 'result.jpg'.\n";
70 }
71
72 bool try_use_gpu = false;
73 vector<Mat> imgs;
74 string result_name = "result.jpg";
75
76 int parseCmdArgs(int argc, char** argv)
77 {
78 if (argc == 1)
79 {
80 printUsage();
81 return -1;
82 }
83 for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
84 {
85 if (string(argv[i]) == "--help" || string(argv[i]) == "/?")
86 {
87 printUsage();
88 return -1;
89 }
90 else if (string(argv[i]) == "--try_gpu")
91 {
92 if (string(argv[i + 1]) == "no")
93 try_use_gpu = false;
94 else if (string(argv[i + 1]) == "yes")
95 try_use_gpu = true;
96 else
97 {
98 cout << "Bad --try_use_gpu flag value\n";
99 return -1;
100 }
101 i++;
102 }
103 else if (string(argv[i]) == "--output")
104 {
105 result_name = argv[i + 1];
106 i++;
107 }
108 else
109 {
110 Mat img = imread(argv[i]);
111 if (img.empty())
112 {
113 cout << "Can't read image '" << argv[i] << "'\n";
114 return -1;
115 }
116 imgs.push_back(img);
117 }
118 }
119 return 0;
120 }
121
122
123 int main(int argc, char* argv[])
124 {
125 int retval = parseCmdArgs(argc, argv);
126 if (retval) return -1;
127
128 Mat pano;
129 Stitcher stitcher = Stitcher::createDefault(try_use_gpu);
130 Stitcher::Status status = stitcher.stitch(imgs, pano);
131
132 if (status != Stitcher::OK)
133 {
134 cout << "Can't stitch images, error code = " << status << endl;
135 return -1;
136 }
137
138 imwrite(result_name, pano);
139 return 0;
140 }
141
142
