Spherical stereo for the construction of immersive VR environment

By representing projection of a point at space on a spherical image, called spherical projection, the conventional stereo algorithm can be reformulated. This means that we can acquire the whole surrounding 3D structure of environments for the construction of immersive VR (virtual reality) environment by full view spherical images, called spherical stereo, instead of the conventional approach that uses a normal camera with a limited view to take multiple plane images, reconstructs parts of the environment structure from multiple image pairs, respectively, and finally fuses them as the whole surrounding 3D structure of environments. In this paper we give the concrete approach to realize this spherical stereo method and show the effectiveness of this method.