Post-stitching Depth Adjustment for Stereoscopic Panorama

In general, the viewing experience of stereoscopic panoramas heavily relies on the accuracy of perceived depth information. However, most of existed stereoscopic panorama stitching methods always focus on the improvement, refinement, and correction during the image alignment or panorama stitching. The impairment to the depth information introduced by later steps is rarely under consideration. Thus, we propose one general post-stitching depth correction technique based on sparsely detected control points. The proposed depth correction can be divided into two steps. The global one aims at minimizing the average depth error by adjusting the relative poses of two panoramas. Then, the local step tries to relieve those regions-based depth issues with the morphing technique. For those regions that still suffer from visible depth error after the global correction, we select control points in those depth anomaly patches and utilize the Thin-Plate-Spline technique to warp those features into their target position. To demonstrate the robustness of the proposed depth adjustment technique, various experiments are conducted under different camera arrangements and scenarios. The result indicates that the stereoscopic panoramas after proposed depth adjustment could deliver more reasonable depth information and bring a better viewing experience.