September 2010: At ECCV Steven Lovegrove and I presented our paper on live spherical mosaicing and we also gave a live demo of the system. In this work, we show how to make a mosaicing system which operates sequentially in real-time but also generates globally consistent mosaics over a whole sphere. As video is gathered live from a purely rotating camera held in the hand or on a tripod, two parallel processing threads operate: one tracks the camera pose at frame-rate relative to the current mosaic, stored as a set of registered keyframes, while the second repeatedly globally optimises the keyframe poses and also refines an estimate of camera intrinsics. Both processes are based on whole image alignment on a pyramid rather than feature matching, and Steve’s implementation makes heavy use of GPU acceleration throughout the pipeline. Click on the image below for an example high resolution mosaic (note that this image does not necessarily imply that we are Arsenal fans, we just thought it looked good!)
Real-Time Spherical Mosaicing using Whole Image Alignment (PDF format),
Steven Lovegrove and Andrew J. Davison, ECCV 2010.
