Universal mosaicing using pipe projection

Video mosaicing is commonly used to increase the visual field by pasting together many video frames. Existing mosaicing methods are effective only in very limited cases where the image motion is almost a uniform translation or the camera performs a pure pan. Forward camera motion or camera zoom are very problematic for traditional mosaicing. A mosaicing methodology to allow image mosaicing in the most general cases is presented, where frames in the video sequence are transformed such that the optical flow becomes parallel. This transformation is an oblique projection of the image into a "viewing pipe" whose central axis is the trajectory of the camera. The "pipe projection" enables to define high quality mosaicing even for the most challenging cases of forward motion and of zoom. In addition view interpolation, generating dense intermediate views is used to overcome parallax effects.