Applying super-resolution to panoramic mosaics

Mosaicing and super resolution are two ways to combine information from multiple frames in video sequences. Mosaicing displays the information of multiple frames in a single panoramic image. Super-resolution uses regions which appear in multiple frames to improve resolution and reduce noise. Simple combination of the two methods is problematic since the alignment used for mosaicing may not be accurate enough over the entire region for super resolution. In this paper we introduce a 2-step process: First we create a panoramic mosaic from the images. We then align small image regions to the panorama, and apply super resolution resulting in a panoramic image with higher resolution. 1. Panoramic Mosaicing Video sequences of a scene can be compactly represented in a single image using panoramic mosaicing. The images are projected onto a common manifold [7, 6, 5, 3, 8] to create a single panoramic image. See Fig. 1. Two methods to construct a mosaic are: (i) combining the aligned images by a median, average etc. (ii) each region in the mosaic is taken only from one of the overlapping images. Method (i) requires accurate alignment over the entire image area, otherwise the resulting mosaic will be blurred. Method (ii) requires alignment only along the seams, but blending is necessary to conceal gain differences.