Squaring the Circle in Panoramas
Squaring the Circle in Panoramas Lihi Zelnik-Manor1 Gabriele Peters2 Pietro Perona1 1. Department of Electrical Engineering 2. Informatik VII (Graphische Systeme) California Institute of Technology Universitat Dortmund Pasadena, CA 91125, USA Dortmund, Germany http://www.vision.caltech.edu/lihi/SquarePanorama.html Abstract and conveying the vivid visual impression of large panora- mas. Such mosaics are superior to panoramic pictures taken Pictures taken by a rotating camera cover the viewing with conventional fish-eye lenses in many respects: they sphere surrounding the center of rotation. Having a set of may span wider fields of view, they have unlimited reso- images registered and blended on the sphere what is left to lution, they make use of cheaper optics and they are not be done, in order to obtain a flat panorama, is projecting restricted to the projection geometry imposed by the lens. the spherical image onto a picture plane. This step is unfor- The geometry of single view point panoramas has long tunately not obvious – the surface of the sphere may not be been well understood [12, 21]. This has been used for mo- flattened onto a page without some form of distortion. The saicing of video sequences (e.g., [13, 20]) as well as for ob- objective of this paper is discussing the difficulties and op- taining super-resolution images (e.g., [6, 23]). By contrast portunities that are connected to the projection from view- when the point of view changes the mosaic is ‘impossible’ ing sphere to image plane. We first explore a number of al- unless the structure of the scene is very special.
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