360 x 360 Mosaics: Regular and Stereoscopic

Abstract

A mosaic is constructed by stitching¹ together multiple images, where the individual images correspond to different views of the scene captured from approximately the same viewpoint. Several methods for image mosaicing have been proposed (for examples, see [38, 178. 312, 49, 122, 146, 214, 231, 267, 241, 158, 181, 273]). These techniques use a conventional imaging lens to capture the image sequence. Since such lenses have limited fields of view, the computation of a complete spherical mosaic requires the capture and processing of a large number of images. In addition, errors in the image projection model and errors in the estimation of motion between images makes it difficult to complete the sphere without undesirable seams in the final mosaic. Further, in the case of a hand-held camera, it is hard for the user to ensure that the complete sphere has been scanned during the capture process.