Robust Generation of 360° Panoramic Views from Consumer Video Sequences”, to appear.pdf

ROBUST GENERATION OF 360° PANORAMIC VIEWS FROM CONSUMER VIDEO SEQUENCES Aljoscha Smoli? Heinrich-Hertz-Institute (HHI) Einsteinufer 37, 10587 Berlin, Germany, smolic@hhi.de Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm for generation of 360° panoramic views from consumer video sequences. The robust approach considers the limited quality and the various distortions that such material usually contains. In a first stage the focal length of the camera is estimated from estimated warping parameters of the planar perspective motion model. Then the images are projected onto a cylinder surface and the amount of rotation of each image is estimated using a gradient descent algorithm. The presented results prove the suit- ability and accuracy of the algorithm. Key words: Global motion estimation, video mosaicing, panoramic imaging, virtual scenes, cylindrical mosaics 1. INTRODUCTION The process of video mosaicing denotes the transformation and blending of all images of a considered video sequence into a common reference coordinate system. The result is a very compact representation of the visual content of the whole video by a single static image, which is highly attractive for a variety of video processing applications. Such video mosaics can be employed for coding, segmentation, editing, and content description (indexing, re- trieval, MPEG-7) [4]. Another important application is the generation of photo-realistic virtual scenes and envi- ronments [6]. The user can navigate through these environments and retrieve visual informa- tion about certain places in the world, virtually visit cities, sights, (even non-terrestrial) land- scapes, buildings, museums, etc. The popular QuickTimeVR? system [1] is an example for an already available application designed for Internet usage. It allows rotation and zoom within a photo realistic 360° cylindrical or a cubical panoramic view. All information is downloaded completely before display. In order to assure an acceptable reaction time of th