Stabilizing route panoramas

The route panorama (RP) has been proposed as a new digital medium to record and visualize cityscapes along a route. It is a compact, continuous and complete visual representation of scenes collected from a sequence of slit views with a camera moving along a smooth path. In real scene acquisition, a camera may suffer from vehicle shaking and the obtained route panoramas are jagged and waved. To improve the quality of route panoramas, we develop an algorithm to stabilize them. By referring the continuous linear features, we use median filters to smooth the 2D route panorama. By setting the slit properly with respect to the camera, we can reduce the influence from the vehicle shaking in the RP without matching consecutive video frames. We have rectified long distance route panoramas to a moderate level for virtual tours and visual navigation.