How to detect contiguos images - opencv

Question

I am trying to detect when two images correspond to a chunk that matches the other image but there is no overlap.
That is, suppose we have the Lenna image:
Someone unknown to me has split it vertically in two and I must know if both pieces are connected or not (assume that they are independent images or that one is a piece of the other).
A:
B:
The positive part is that I know the order of the pieces, the negative part is that there may be other images and I must know which of them fit or not to join them.
My first idea has been to check if the MAE between the last row of A and the first row B is low.
def mae(a, b):
min_mae = 256
for i in range(-5, 5, 1):
a_s = np.roll(a, i, axis=1)
value_mae = np.mean(abs(a_s - b))
min_mae = min(min_mae, value_mae)
return min_mae
if mae(im_a[im_a.shape[0] - 1:im_a.shape[0], ...], im_b[0:1, ...]) < threshold:
# join images a and b
The problem is that it is a not very robust metric.
I have done the same using the horizontal derivative, as well as applying various smoothing filters, but I find myself in the same situation.
Is there a way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Your method seems like a decent one. Even on visual inspection it looks reasonable:
Top (Bottom row expanded)
Bottom (Top row expanded)
Diff of the images:
It might even be more clear if you also check neighboring columns, but this already looks like the images are similar enough.
Code
import cv2
import numpy as np
# load images
top = cv2.imread("top.png");
bottom = cv2.imread("bottom.png");
# gray
tgray = cv2.cvtColor(top, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY);
bgray = cv2.cvtColor(bottom, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY);
# expand rows
texp = tgray;
bexp = bgray;
trow = np.zeros_like(texp);
brow = np.zeros_like(bexp);
trow[:] = texp[-1, :];
brow[:] = bexp[0, :];
trow = trow[:100, :];
brow = brow[:100, :];
# check absolute difference
ldiff = trow - brow;
rdiff = brow - trow;
diff = np.minimum(ldiff, rdiff);
# show
cv2.imshow("top", trow);
cv2.imshow("bottom", brow);
cv2.imshow("diff", diff);
cv2.waitKey(0);
# save
cv2.imwrite("top_out.png", trow);
cv2.imwrite("bottom_out.png", brow);
cv2.imwrite("diff_out.png", diff);