I am wanting to automatically align stereo images for best fit. The images are taken only a few inches apart and in the same lighting conditions etc but there might be slight rotations and shifts etc. Can someone describe the best approach for this sort of task? I assume one could use template matching. Would a brute force approach work just fine? Would it be better to detect features in each and try to align the features? I am not looking to rectify the images, just find the closest alignment. Any direction about methodology would be very appreciated.
Edit: Basically this will be a similar method to creating a panorama except that I do not need to warp the image.