Overcoming Parallax and Sampling Density Issues in Image Mosaicing of Non-Planar Scenes

Image mosaicing constructs a wide field-of-view result from multiple source frames. In order to ensure a perceptually correct result, mosaicing typically requires either a planar or near-planar scene, parallax-free camera motion between source frames, or a dense sampling of the scene. When these conditions are not satisfied, various artifacts may result. A novel mosaicing approach is introduced that overcomes these limitations, building on the techniques of image-based rendering and manifold mosaicing, while permitting the synthesis of an effective mosaic of a non-planar scene from a sparse set of translated cameras. Our method first generates a series of intermediate virtual frames to reduce the disparities between neighboring images. Next, a series of vertical slices are chosen from the array of both real and virtual frames and connected according to a cost function that maximizes the similarity between adjacent slices. Experimental results indicate significant improvements over competing methods.