Spherical panoramic mosaics with the image division and warping methods

Some limitations exist in previous approaches for spherical panoramic mosaics. They usually employ optimizing methods for image registration, and need particular imaging equipments. In this paper we present a new approach to automatically create seamless spherical panoramas from image sequences. These images are acquired from an approximately fixed point by using off-the-shelf cameras and tripods. This approach employs the FFT-based phase-correlation algorithm to approximately compute the transformation relationships between images. To avoid the accumulation of registration errors, we mosaic the images acquired along each vertical line into a vertical sub-image, and then generate a spherical panorama from all the vertical sub-images by employing the image division and warping methods. As demonstrated by the experiment results, the new approach can generate high-quality mosaics while requiring simpler manual operations and less time consumption.Imaging Science & Photographic TechnologyEICPCI-S(ISTP)