Smartphone-Based Crowdsourcing for Panoramic Virtual Tour Construction

Virtual tour applications have gained popularity in recent years by providing immersed user experience and visual navigation hints. Typically, a virtual tour contains both image data and inter-scene spatial connections, and is usually presented as a constellation of images. The construction of virtual tours originally requires sophisticated devices and time-consuming site survey. Lately, the technology advance in smartphones facilitates the virtual tour capture on such versatile end devices. In this work, we introduce a crowdsourced approach toenable large-scale panoramic virtual tour construction with the active participation of smartphone users. We have designed and implemented the framework, as well as proposed further optimizations on constellation construction. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the overall performance, including image quality, constellation accuracy, user experience, and energy efficiency.