Comparison of Radial and Tangential Geometries for Cylindrical Panorama

This paper presents a new approach which builds 360-degree cylindrical panoramic images from multiple cameras. In order to ensure a perceptually correct result, mosaicing typically requires either a planar or near-planar scene, parallax-free camera motion between source frames, or a dense sampling of the scene. When these conditions are not satisfied, various artifacts may appear. There are many algorithms to overcome these problems. We propose a panoramic setup where cameras are placed evenly around a circle. Instead of looking outward, which is the traditional configuration, we propose to make the optical axes tangent to the camera circle, a "tangential" configuration. We will demonstrate that this configuration is very insensitive to depth estimation, which reduces stitching artifacts. This property is only limited by the fact that tangential cameras usually occlude each other along the circle. Beside an analysis and comparison of radial and tangential geometries, we provide an experimental setup with real panoramas obtained in realistic conditions.