Image Cube Trajectory Analysis for 3D Reconstruction of Concentric Mosaics

We present a new concept for the extension of epipolar image analysis to more general camera configurations like circular camera movements usually occuring for concentric mosaic acquisition. The robust method for 3D scene depth reconstruction which we call Image Cube Trajectory Analysis (ICT) is no longer restricted to horizontal, linear, and equidistant camera movements but works with arbitrary camera configurations. Similar to epipolar image analysis, the algorithm uses all available views of an image sequence simultaneously. Instead of searching for straight lines in the epipolar image, we explicitly compute the trajectories of particular points through the image cube. Variation of the unknown depth leads to different curves. The best match is assumed to correspond to the true depth. It is selected by evaluating color constancy along the curve. For the example of concentric mosaics, we derive an occlusion compatible ordering scheme that guarantees an optimal processing of occluding object points during the ICT analysis.