Efficient Generation of Multi-perspective Panoramas

In this paper, we present an efficient technique for generating multi-perspective panoramic images of long scenes. The input to our system is a video sequence captured by a moving camera navigating through a long scene, and our goal is to efficiently generate a panoramic summary of the scene. This problem has received considerable attention in recent years, leading to the development of a number of systems capable of generating high-quality panoramas. However, a significant limitation of current systems is their computational complexity: most current techniques employ computationally expensive algorithms (such as structure-from-motion and dense stereo), or require some degree of manual interaction. In turn, this limits the scalability of the algorithms as well as their ease of implementation. In contrast, the technique we present is simple, efficient, easy to implement, and produces results of comparable quality to state of the art techniques, while doing so at a fraction of the computational cost. Our system operates entirely in the 2D image domain, performing robust image alignment and optical flow based mosaicing, in lieu of more expensive 3D pose/structure computation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on a number of challenging image sequences.