Toward effectively generating environment maps

We explore a cost-effective approach to creating environment maps. Unlike other environment map generating systems that use specially designed mirrors or sensing devices, our system uses off-the-shelf digital cameras. This makes our system potentially acquirable by average consumers. In our design, the two digital cameras are displaced vertically with parallel optical axes, and the rotation axis passes through the focal points of the two cameras. This vertical displacement arrangement overcomes the problem of having inconsistent occlusions in two adjacent stereo image sets that happen in a horizontally displaced stereo camera system. To obtain dense spatial images, our system uses color-informationbased algorithms to propagate disparity values from matched feature points to unmatched feature points and featureless areas. Schemes of transforming local 3-D (X,Y,Z) data to a world coordinate system are also devised to smoothly stitch 3-D data from individual frames for virtual reality modeling language graphics display. © 2003 SPIE and IS&T. [DOI: 10.1117/1.1557697]