A practical approach to creating environment maps using digital images

Conventional panoramic stereo camera heads have a horizontal displacement structure. When a camera head is used in generating a spatial panorama, it may encounter occlusion inconsistency in the overlap region of two adjacent viewing angles; that is, occlusion may occur from one viewing angle, but not from an adjacent angle. Also, computing spatial panorama may become unnecessarily complex. This paper reports a solution to the above problems by using a dual camera head with the two cameras being displaced vertically with parallel optical axes, and by letting the rotation axis pass through the focal points of the two cameras.