Panoramic image transform of omnidirectional images using discrete geometry techniques

This work proposes an omnidirectional-to-panoramic image transform with high accuracy using PDE-based resampling models. For the application of computer-vision techniques to omnidirectional images, the transformation of omnidirectional images to uniform-resolution quadric-surface images is needed in the two reasons. First, an omnidirectional image does not have a uniform resolution. Second, the development of the computer-vision-based techniques on the quadric surface is mathematically accurate compared with the development of the techniques on the omnidirectional image directly. Therefore, our aim is to generate uniform-resolution panoramic images on cylindrical surface from nonuniform-resolution omnidirectional images. The uniform-resolution panoramic images allow us to reconstruct 3D objects and scenes from omnidirectional images robustly. Our panoramic transformation selects the uniform resolution pixels on omnidirectional images employing the geometrical configuration of cameras in the estimation and resampling process. Therefore, our method is mathematically accurate comparing to the traditional panoramic transformation using point-to-point correspondences with the geometries of cameras and the cubic convolution.