Seamless stitching of stereo images for generating infinite panoramas

Abstract

A stereo infinite panorama is a panoramic image that may be infinitely extended by continuously stitching together stereo images that depict similar scenes, but are taken from different geographic locations. It can be used to create interesting walkthrough environment. An important issue underlying this application is to seamlessly stitch two stereo images together. Although many methods have been proposed for stitching 2D images, they may not work well on stereo images, due to the difficulty in ensuring disparity consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel method to stitch two stereo images seamlessly. We first apply the graph cut algorithm to compute a seam for stitching, with a novel disparity-aware energy function to both ensure disparity continuity and suppress visual artifacts around the seam. We then apply a modified warping-based disparity scaling algorithm to suppress the seam in depth domain. Experiments show that our stitching method is capable of producing high quality stereo infinite panoramas.