Spatial resolution analysis of route panorama

Route panorama is a new image format extracted from a video sequence taken by a camera mounted on a moving vehicle. We select a virtual slit in the image frame and continuously capture the slit view on the frame. The consecutive slit views are connected to form a 2D spatial image. It is a continuous, compact and complete visual representation of scenes along a route, which will play an important role in digital city, virtual tour, and navigation application. Route panorama has unique properties as compared with normal perspective images. In our experiment, we found that distant objects from the camera path are blurred horizontally in the route panorama. In order to understand resolution of route panorama images, we study theoretical definition and real physical formation of route panoramas in this paper. We have examined that scenes at different depths are sampled differently by the route panorama. This work investigates various factors that determine the spatial resolution of route panoramas. The results are particularly important to the capturing of route panoramas and depth estimation based on blurring.