Constructing image mosaics using focus based depth analysis

Image alignment techniques have gained popularity for constructing image mosaics from video sequences. These image alignment techniques, however, have a hard time dealing with motion parallax, which limits their applicability. This paper studies image mosaicing in the presence of motion parallax and develops a new algorithm for generating view dependent image mosaics from low-flying aerial video sequences exhibiting strong parallax effects. Specifically we develop an energy minimization framework that computes a dense depth map of the scene from a sequence of images (captured by an uncalibrated camera following an unknown trajectory), which in turn can be used to generate a panoramic mosaic through view interpolation. We evaluate our algorithm on real and synthetic aerial video sequences and show that the proposed algorithm can construct high quality image mosaics even in the presence of strong parallax.