Construction of Panoramic Image Mosaics with Global and Local Alignment

Abstract

The automatic construction of large, high-resolution image mosaics is an active area of research in the fields of photogrammetry, computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics. Image mosaics can be used for many different applications [163, 1.22]. The most traditional application is the construction of large aerial and satellite photographs from collections of images [186]. More recent applications include scene stabilization and change detection [93], video compression [125, 122, 167] and video indexing [240], increasing the field of view [105, 177, 266] and resolution [126, 50] of a camera, and even simple photo editing [38]. A particularly popular application is the emulation of traditional film-based panoramic photography [175] with digital panoramic mosaics, for applications such as the construction of virtual environments [181, 267] and virtual travel [49].