Generalized panoramic mosaic

Claim 3

The method of claim 1 wherein step (b) of warping the strips includes transforming said strips into strips having straight edges before the strips are combined together.

Claim 4

The method according to claim 1 , wherein two-dimensional images are related by an affine transformation or by a planar-projective transformation.

Claim 5

The method of claim 1 wherein said images are projected onto a three-dimensional cylinder whose major axis approximates the path of camera optical center, the combination of the strips being achieved by translating the projected two-dimensional images substantially along the cylindrical surface of the three-dimensional cylinder.

Claim 6

The method of claim 4 wherein every two subsequent images define their own cylinder whose major axis substantially passes through the optical center of the camera, and the cylinders are concatenated substantially along the image sequence.

Claim 7

The method according to claim 1 , wherein a transformation is applied to the panoramic mosaic depending on a desired viewpoint.

Claim 8

The method according to claim 1 , wherein the sequence of images is augmented by sets of interpolated images intermediate to the images of the sequence of images, and wherein the strips are augmented with strips defined on the interpolated images.

Claim 9

A memory containing a file representing a panoramic mosaic of a scene generated by the method of claim 1 .

Claim 10

A computer program product comprising a computer useable medium having computer readable program code embodied therein of combining a sequence of two-dimensional images of a scene for obtaining a panoramic mosaic of the scene, said sequence of two-dimensional images being acquired by a moving camera in relative motion with respect to the scene, said camera motion giving rise to optical flow between the images, the computer program product comprising computer readable program code for causing the computer to perform method steps of claim 1 .

Claim 11

The method of claim 1 wherein step (b) of warping the strips includes transforming said strips into strips having their front and back edges fitting an edge of an adjacent strip.

Claim 12

The method of claim 1 wherein step (b) of warping the strips includes rescaling said strips to rectangular strips so that their front edge be substantially aligned with the back edge of an adjacent strip.

Claim 13

The method of claim 1 wherein at least one strip of said strips is a circular strip, the front edge of said circular strip being an arc of length l 1 having a radius r 1 , the back edge of said circular strip being an arc of length l 2 having a radius r 2 , and the rescaling includes multiplying l 1 by r 1 /r 2 .

Claim 14

The method of claim 1 wherein step (a) includes: determining a shape of said at least one strip; determining a size and a width of said at least one strip; defining a position of said at least one strip on a two-dimensional image; and cutting said at least one strip from the two-dimensional image.

Claim 15

Use of the method of claim 1 for handling at least one case from the group consisting of image parallax, camera zoom, forward camera motion, and general camera motion combining translation and rotation.

Claim 16

In a method for combining a sequence of two-dimensional images of a scene to construct a panoramic mosaic of said scene, said sequence of images being acquired by a camera for relative motion with respect to said scene, said relative motion giving rise to an optical flow between said images, the improvements comprising the steps of: (a) warping said images so that said optical flow becomes substantially parallel to a direction in which said mosaic is constructed; and (b) pasting said warped images so that said sequence of said images is continuous for said scene, whereby to construct said panoramic mosaic of said scene, wherein said images are projected onto a three-dimensional cylinder whose major axis approximates the path of camera optical center, the combination of the images being achieved by translating the projected two-dimensional images substantially along the cylindrical surface of the three-dimensional cylinder, and wherein every two subsequent images define their own cylinder whose major axis substantially passes through the optical center of the camera, and the cylinders are concatenated substantially along the image sequence.

Claim 17

In a method for combining a sequence of two-dimensional images of a scene to construct a panoramic mosaic of said scene, said sequence of images being acquired by a camera for relative motion with respect to said scene, said relative motion giving rise to an optical flow between said images, the improvements comprising the steps of: (a) warping said images so that said optical flow becomes substantially parallel to a direction in which said mosaic is constructed; and (b) pasting said warped images so that said sequence of said images is continuous for said scene, whereby to construct said panoramic mosaic of said scene, wherein said images are projected onto a three-dimensional cylinder whose major axis approximates the path of camera optical center, the combination of the images being achieved by translating the projected two-dimensional images substantially along the cylindrical surface of the three-dimensional cylinder, and wherein every two subsequent images define their own cylinder whose major axis substantially passes through the optical center of the camera, and the cylinders are concatenated substantially along the image sequence.