Rectified Mosaicing: Mosaics without the Curl

When images captured by a tilted camera are mosaiced into a panorama, the resulting mosaic is curled. This happens, for example, with a panning camera that is not perfectly horizontal, and with a translating camera facing a tilted planar surface. The tilt of the camera causes differences in image velocity between the top and bottom parts of the image, causing the curled mosaic. In rectified mosaicing these distortions are overcome by warping the strips into rectangles, while keeping some image feature invariant. This warping equalizes the image motion at the different image parts, and the resulting mosaic is straight. Mosaicing is done without camera calibration or knowledge of the scene, and the process adapts automatically to smooth changes in the scene and the imaging conditions. Figure 1. A curled mosaic constructed by Manifold Mosaicing. The panning camera was slightly tilted upwards. scribed in Section 2.