Panoramic Epipolar Image Generation for Mobile Mapping System

The notable improvements on performance and low cost of digital cameras and GPS/IMU devices have caused MMSs (Mobile Mapping Systems) to be gradually becoming one of the most important devices for mapping highway and railway networks, generating and updating road navigation data and constructing urban 3D models over the last 20 years. Moreover, the demands for large scale visual street-level image database construction by the internet giants such as Google and Microsoft have made the further rapid development of this technology. As one of the most important sensors, the omni-directional cameras are being commonly utilized on many MMSs to collect panoramic images for 3D close range photogrammetry and fusion with 3D laser point clouds since these cameras could record much visual information of the real environment in one image at field view angle of 360° in longitude direction and 180° in latitude direction. This paper addresses the problem of panoramic epipolar image generation for 3D modelling and mapping by stereoscopic viewing. These panoramic images are captured with Point Grey’s Ladybug3 mounted on the top of Mitsubishi MMS-X 220 at 2m intervals along the streets in urban environment. Onboard GPS/IMU, speedometer and post sequence image analysis technology such as bundle adjustment provided high accuracy position and attitude data for these panoramic images and laser data, this makes it possible to construct the epipolar geometric relationship between any two adjacent panoramic images and then the panoramic epipolar images could be generated. Three kinds of projection planes: sphere, cylinder and flat plane are selected as the epipolar images’ planes. In final we select the flat plane and use its effective parts (middle parts of base line’s two sides) for epipolar image generation. The corresponding geometric relations and results will be presented in this paper. * Corresponding author.