Panoramic mosaics by manifold projection

As the field of view of a picture is much smaller than our own visual field of view, it is common to paste together several pictures to create a panoramic mosaic having a larger field of view. Images with a wider field of view can be generated by using fish-eye lens, or panoramic mosaics can be created by special devices which rotate around the camera's optical center (Quicktime VR, Surround Video), or by aligning, and pasting, frames in a video sequence to a single reference frame. Existing mosaicing methods have strong limitations on imaging conditions, and distortions are common. Manifold projection enables the creation of panoramic mosaics from video sequences under more general conditions, and in particular the unrestricted motion of a hand-held camera. The panoramic mosaic is a projection of the scene into a virtual manifold whose structure depends on the camera's motion. This manifold is more general than the customary projections onto a single image plane or onto a cylinder. In addition to being more general than traditional mosaics, manifold projection is also computationally efficient, as the only image deformations used are image plane translations and rotations. Real-time, software only, implementation on a Pentium-PC, proves the superior quality and speed of this approach.