Development and Application of an Extended Geometric Model for High Resolution Panoramic Cameras

Digital panoramic photography has become a popular tool to record landscapes, city squares or indoor scenes in a single image with a full 360° view. In photogrammetric applications, a digital panoramic camera may present an interesting alternative to conventional image acquisition techniques such as large format film or plate based cameras. Advantages of such a camera are their very high resolution, which allows the recognition of fine object detail, and the possibility of recording panorama-like object geometries such as city squares or indoor scenes by taking only a few images. This paper describes and investigates a strict mathematical model for rotating line panoramic cameras, developed at the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the Dresden University of Technology. The model accuracy was improved considerably through additional parameters, which describe deviations from the basic geometric model of cylinder projection. Furthermore the mathematical model was successfully implemented in different photogrammetric data processing routines, such as a self-calibrating bundle adjustment of panoramic image data. Based on this work, the combination of rotating line panoramic cameras and the mathematical model depict a very suitable tool for precise 3D modelling of indoor scenes, city squares or long façades in combination with the analysis of very high resolution texture information. The paper concentrates on results of a self-calibrating bundle adjustment using the developed geometric model of panoramic image data. Furthermore some examples of high resolution 3D-models generated with the panoramic camera EYESCAN M3 will be presented as well as other applications which are derived from the geometric model such as epipolar line geometry for stereo or multi-image matching. Fig. 1: Panorama of Theaterplatz, Dresden (camera: KST EYESCAN M3, Image format: 53,800 × 10,200 Pixel; further panoramas in (Schneider, 2004))