Spherical Mosaics: Regular and Stereoscopic - Slice Camera Output
Project Page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/proje...
Traditional mosaicing methods use narrow field of view cameras to acquire image data. This poses problems when computing a complete spherical mosaic. First, a large number of images are needed to capture a sphere. Second, errors in mosaicing make it difficult to complete the spherical mosaic without seams. Third, with a hand-held camera it is hard for the user to ensure complete coverage of the sphere. This projects presents two approaches to spherical mosaicing. The first is to rotate a 360 degree camera about a single axis to capture a sequence of 360 degree strips. The unknown rotations between the strips are estimated and the strips are blended together to obtain a spherical mosaic. The second approach seeks to significantly enhance the resolution of the computed mosaic by capturing 360 slices rather than strips. A few different slice cameras are proposed that map a thin 360 degree sheet of rays onto a large image area. This results in the capture of high resolution slices despite the use of a low resolution video camera. A slice camera is rotated using a motorized turntable to obtain regular as well as stereoscopic spherical mosaics.
The slice camera maps a thin 360 degree slice onto a large disc in the image. Even though the detector of the camera has low resolution (640x480 pixels) the mapping performed by the slice camera allows one to compute a high resolution slice of the world.