Building full view spherical panoramas via an image-based approach

Abstract

The paper presents an image-based approach for building spherical panoramas for image-based virtual reality systems.The proposed approach includes the design of the omni-directional picture-taking manner, the image warping from a photographic image to the spherical environment map, and the image mosaic algorithm to seam these photographic images together to build a seamless spherical panorama. A parametric spherical environment map is used to store the image data of the spherical panorama. The image mosaic algorithm. through the horizontal and vertical image registration accompanied with fine-tunning, can compute the accurate sight direction of each picture. Thus, it can tolerate some errors in sight directions predefined, which are resulted from the imperfect photographic equipment. When the stitched spherical panorama is navigated, an image browser can retrieve the image data of the scene based on the desired view direction from the spherical environment map.