A robust image mosaicing technique capable of creating integrated panoramas

Abstract

Existing featureless image mosaicing techniques do not pay enough attention to the robustness of the image registration process, and are not able to combine multiple video sequences into an integrated panoramic view. These problems have certainly restricted applications of the existing methods for large-scale panorama composition, video content overview and information visualization. In this paper we propose a method that is able to create an integrated panoramic view for a virtual camera from multiple video sequences which each records a part of a vast scene. The method further enables the user to visualize the integrated panoramic view from an arbitrary viewpoint and orientation by altering the parameters of the virtual camera. To ensure a robust and accurate panoramic view synthesis from long video sequences, we attach a global positioning system (GPS) to the video camera, and utilize its output data to provide initial estimates for the camera's translational parameters, and to prevent the camera parameter recovery process from falling into spurious local minima. Our proposed method is not only suitable for video content overview but also applicable to the areas of information visualization, team collaborations, disastrous rescues, etc. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.