On the Geometrical Quality of Panoramic Images

Creating of panoramic images is a common technique nowadays. The needed components are a sequence of overlapping digital images and a suitable stitching software. There are several software available for combining single images together just by few mouse clicks. They can also take care of the image distortions and adjust the radiometric differences so that the final image looks very consistent. In addition to the commercial software there are also free ones, which can be downloaded from Internet. Panoramic images are used in many different contexts. Real estate agents have on their web pages 360 degrees panoramic views of interiors of the houses for sale. Panoramic views can be found in many virtual reality and multimedia presentations, advertisements, work of arts, etc. Depending on the usage there are different requirements for the panoramic images. For a real estate agent it might be enough that the panorama is seamless and gives impressive presentation of the interior of the house. The most important thing is that the image looks impressive. But this is not always the case. If the images are used for measurement purposes the geometrical quality of the panoramic images is important. Even though panoramic images are not very often used in measurement tasks there are some cases where they might be advantageous. Sometimes, for example, the image must be taken quite far away from the object in order to see enough control points. This might reduce visible details. But using panoramic images taken closer to the object might give both enough control points and visible details. This paper concentrates on the geometrical quality of the panoramic images created from concentric image sequences. The main goal is to understand the suitability of panoramic images for photogrammetric measurements.