The study of different panorama generation methods and their applications

In this paper, a new method is proposed to reconstruct a 3D image from video captured by a rotating camera. Our approach uses a large collection of images taken by a camera whose motion has been constrained to planar concentric circles. We resample regular perspective images to produce a set of multi-perspective panoramas and then compute depth maps directly from these resampled panoramas. Our panoramas sample uniformly in three dimensions: rotation angle, inverse radial distance and vertical elevation. The use of multi-perspective panoramas eliminates the limited overlap present in the original input images and, thus, problems such as those in conventional multi-baseline stereo can be avoided. Our approach differs from stereo matching of single-perspective panoramic images taken from different locations, where the epi-polar constraints are sine curves. For our multi-perspective panoramas, the epi-polar geometry, to the first order approximation, consists of horizontal lines.