Construction and Rendering of Concentric Mosaics from a Handheld Camera

Concentric mosaics are low-dimensional lightfields. Yet capturing concentric mosaics requires a motor-controlled device and it is not practical for real outdoor scenes. In this paper, we propose a new concentric mosaic construction method by hand rotating an outward-looking camera. The geometry of such a capturing system is formulated as an outward-looking circular motion with unknown rotation angles. Then, a new and practical method of analyzing the motion and structure of a very long sequence of images is developed. The method needs to compute one fundamental matrix for a typical sequence of 3000 frames and track one point in three frames to propagate the recovery of the rotation angles to the whole sequence. We will demonstrate the superior performance of mosaics construction and rendering results by using the new algorithm.