Animated panorama from a panning video sequence

In the recent applications of virtual reality and augmented reality, panoramic-image-based representation of real world environments has received much attention for its advantages over the traditional 3D modeling approaches, such as shorter generation times, faster rendering speeds, higher photorealism, and less storage needed. The drawback is however that it stores only static information of the scene. Panoramic video has been proposed to preserve wide field-of-view dynamic characteristics of the natural environment, which is especially suitable for outdoor sceneries. Its limitation is lack of control of such video. In this paper, a newly developed software program is presented, which takes a single video sequence from a panning camera, and generates a cylindrical panorama embedded with video textures, called animated panorama. The program has the following functions: seamless video textures generation, undesired object removal by video inpainting, and animated panorama player. We claim that the quality of the animated panorama produced by our program is satisfactory to virtual reality applications and the computation time is acceptable for practical use.