Panoramic Stereo Imaging System with Automatic Disparity Warping and Seaming

Abstract

In this paper, we present a panoramic stereo imaging (PSI) system which can produce stereo panoramas for image-based VR systems. This PSI system is referred to as the PSI-II system, which is an improved system of our previous experimental PSI-I system. The PSI-I system uses a well-calibrated tripod system to acquire a series of stereo image pairs, while the PSI-II system does not require the use of a well-calibrated tripod system and can automatically generate a stereo-pair of panoramic images by using a novel hierarchical seaming algorithm. Our PSI-II system can automatically correct the epipolar lines inconsistency of the stereo images pairs and the disparity distortion of the images caused by the dislocation of the camera’s lens center in the image acquisition process. With the stereo and automatic correction features, the proposed method can easily provide more realistic 360。panoramic views than other image-based VR systems can.