Mosaic image generation on a flattened Gaussian sphere

Abstract

Mosaicing of images is the task of fusing a collection of images with smaller fields of view to obtain an image with a larger field of view. In order to accomplish this task, images should be geometrically and radiometrically corrected. We propose a new approach for perspective correction, useful when smaller images are gathered by rotating a camera with a fixed position. These images are projected onto a Gaussian sphere centered at the focal point of the camera which is later flattened on a plane tangent to the sphere. Using this procedure a field of view of up to 360/spl deg/ can be obtained on a mosaic image. We illustrate the geometric correction capability of our procedure (including more traditional gray level modification and seam elimination techniques) on outdoor scene images that partly overlap with each other.