Minimal Aspect Distortion (MAD) Mosaicing of Long Scenes

Abstract Long scenes can be imaged by mosaicing multiple images from cameras scanning the scene. We address the case of a video camera scanning a scene while moving in a long path, e.g. scanning a city street from a driving car, or scanning a terrain from a low flying aircraft. A robust approach to this task is presented, which is applied successfully to sequences having thousands of frames even when using a hand-held camera. Examples are given on a few challenging sequences. The proposed system consists of two components: (i) Motion and depth computation. (ii) Mosaic rendering. In the first part a "direct" method is presented for computing motion and dense depth. Robustness of motion computation has been increased by limiting the motion model for the scanning camera. An iterative graph-cuts approach, with planar labels and a flexible similarity measure, allows the computation of a dense depth for the entire sequence. In the second part a new minimal aspect distortion (MAD) m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IJCV
• Authors: Alex Rav-Acha, Giora Engel, Shmuel Peleg
• Keywords: Abstract Long Scenes, Camera, IJCV 2008, Low Flying Aircraft