Construction and Refinement of Panoramic Mosaics with Global and Local Alignment

This paper presents techniques for constructing full view panoramic mosaics from sequences of images. Our representation associates a rotation matrix (and optionally a focal length) with each input image, rather than explicitly projecting all of the images onto a common surface (e.g., a cylinder). In order to reduce accumulated registration errors, we apply global alignment (block adjustment) to the whole sequence of images, which results in an optimal image mosaic (in the least-squares sense). To compensate for small amounts of motion parallax introduced by translations of the camera and other unmodeled distortions, we develop a local alignment (deghosting) technique which warps each image based on the results of pairwise local image registrations. By combining both global and local alignment, we significantly improve the quality of our image mosaics, thereby enabling the creation of full view panoramic mosaics with hand-held cameras.