PanoVi: A Multi-Camera Panoramic Movie System by using Client-Side Image Mosaicking

In this paper, we introduce a new panoramic movie system that can capture and play 360◦ viewing angle. The system captures surround movie by using four wide-angle video cameras, and then the video streams are encoded as a single stream of common video format. At the viewing side, geometric correction and image mosaicking are performed in real-time by using 3D graphics accelerators hardware. By mapping the mosaic on the inside wall of a cube in 3D space, the viewing system renders partial view of arbitrary direction as a virtual environment. This approach is suitable for real-time transmission of panoramic movie because this system uses standard video format in transmission layer. We developed a prototype system based on Windows and DirectX8 environments. We confirmed full-rate interactive panoramic movie playback on commodity Pentium4 based PCs.