Parallel-perspective stereo mosaics

In this paper we present a novel method for automatically and efficiently generating stereoscopic mosaics by seamless registration of optical data collected by a video camera mounted on an airborne platform that undergoes dominant translational motion. There are four critical points discussed in this paper: (1) Using a parallel-perspective representation, a pair of geometrically registered stereo mosaics can be constructed before we explicitly recover any 3D information under rather general motion. (2) A PRISM (parallel ray interpolation for stereo mosaicing) technique is proposed to make stereo mosaics seamless in the presence of motion parallax and for rather arbitrary scenes. A fast PRISM algorithm is presented and issues on stitching point selection and occlusion handling are discussed. (3) The epipolar geometry of parallel-perspective stereo mosaics generated under constrained 6 DOF motion is formulated, which shows optimal baselines, easy search for correspondence and constant depth resolution. (4) The proposed methods for the generation of stereo mosaics and then the reconstruction of a 3D map are efficient in both computation and storage. Experimental results on long video sequences are given.