"Generating Mosaics with Minimum Distortions"

Doron Feldman & Assaf Zomet, School of Computer Science
and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91904 Jerusalem,
Israel

doronf@cs.huji.ac.il, zomet@cs.columbia.edu

Abstract:

Manifold mosaicing is a fast and robust way to summarize video sequences
captured by a moving camera. It is also useful for rendering compelling 3D
visualizations from a video without estimating the 3D structure of the
scene. However, since the resultmosaics are not perspective images, their
geometry is inherently distorted. These mosaics are commonly referred to
as multi-perspective images, or multi-perspective mosaics.

In this paper we address the following question: Given a video captured by
a moving camera, what is the best multi-perspective mosaic that can be
generated from it? What is the mosaic with the best combination of large
field-of-view and minimal geometric distortions? We define the necessary
conditions for a good mosaic and a quantitive criterion for the geometric
distortions, and derive analytically the optimal mosaic under this
criterion. Results on video sequences confirm that indeed the optimal
mosaic has significantly better quality than those generated by other
techniques.