Panoramic Mosaics with VideoBrush TM

As the eld of view of a picture is much smaller than our own visual eld of view, it is common to paste together several pictures to create a panoramic mosaic having a larger eld of view. While scissors and glue are the tools used in lm photography, more sophisticated methods were enabled with digital video. Panoramic mosaics can be created by special devices which rotate around the camera's optical center (Quicktime VR, Surround Video), or by aligning, and pasting, frames in a video sequence to a single reference frame. Existing mosaicing methods have strong limitations on imaging conditions, and distortions are common. Manifold projection enables the creation of panoramic mosaics from video sequences under very general conditions. The panoramic mosaic is a projection of the scene into a virtual manifold whose structure depends on the camera's motion. This manifold is more general than the customary projections onto a single image plane or onto a cylinder. VideoBrush, which is a real-time, software only, implementation on a PC, proves the superior quality and speed of this approach.