Photographing long scenes with multi-viewpoint panoramas

Abstract

We present a system for producing multi-viewpoint panoramas of long, roughly planar scenes, such as the facades of buildings along a city street, from a relatively sparse set of photographs captured with a handheld still camera that is moved along the scene. Our work is a significant departure from previous methods for creating multi-viewpoint panoramas, which composite thin vertical strips from a video sequence captured by a translating video camera, in that the resulting panoramas are composed of relatively large regions of ordinary perspective. In our system, the only user input required beyond capturing the photographs themselves is to identify the dominant plane of the photographed scene; our system then computes a panorama automatically using Markov Random Field optimization. Users may exert additional control over the appearance of the result by drawing rough strokes that indicate various high-level goals. We demonstrate the results of our system on several scenes, including urban streets, a river bank, and a grocery store aisle.

References

1. Agarwala, A., Dontcheva, M., Agrawala, M., Drucker, S., Colburn, A., Curless, B., Salesin, D., and Cohen, M. 2004. Interactive digital photomontage. ACM Transactions on Graphics 23, 3, 294--302.
2. Agarwala, A., Zheng, K. C., Pal, C., Agrawala, M., Cohen, M., Curless, B., Salesin, D. H., and Szeliski, R. 2005. Panoramic video textures. ACM Transactions on Graphics 24, 3 (Aug.), 821--827.
3. Agrawala, M., Zorin, D., and Munzner, T. 2000. Artistic multiprojection rendering. In Rendering Techniques 2000: 11th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, 125--136.
4. Astola, J., Haavisto, P., and Neuvo, Y. 1990. Vector median filters. Proceedings of the IEEE 78, 678--689.
5. Bertalmio, M., Sapiro, G., Caselles, V., and Ballester, C. 2000. Image inpainting. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2000, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 417--424.
6. Boykov, Y., Veksler, O., and Zabih, R. 2001. Fast approximate energy minimization via graph cuts. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 23, 11, 1222--1239.
7. Brown, M., and Lowe, D. G. 2005. Unsupervised 3D object recognition and reconstruction in unordered datasets. In 3D Imaging and Modeling (3DIM '05), 55--63.
8. Davis, J. 1998. Mosaics of scenes with moving objects. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 98), 354--360.
9. ePaperPress, 2005. http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/.
10. Google, 2005. http://earth.google.com.
11. Gupta, R., and Hartley, R. I. 1997. Linear pushbroom cameras. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19, 9, 963--975.
12. Hartley, R. I., and Zisserman, A. 2004. Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision, second ed. Cambridge University Press.
13. Huber, P. 1981. Robust statistics. John Wiley.
14. Kang, S. B., Szeliski, R., and Chai, J. 2001. Handling occlusions in dense multi-view stereo. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2001), vol. 1, 103--110.
15. Kasser, M., and Egels, Y. 2002. Digital Photogrammetry. Taylor & Francis Inc.
16. Koller, M., 2004. http://www.seamlesscity.com.
17. Kolmogorov, V., and Zabih, R. 2002. What energy functions can be minimized via graph cuts? In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 65--81.
18. Kubovy, M. 1986. The psychology of perspective and renaissance art. Cambridge University Press.
19. Kwatra, V., Schödl, A., Essa, I., Turk, G., and Bobick, A. 2003. Graphcut textures: Image and video synthesis using graph cuts. ACM Transactions on Graphics 22, 3, 277--286.
20. Levin, G., 2005. An informal catalogue of slit-scan video artworks. http://www.flong.com/writings/lists/list_slit_scan.html.
21. Levoy, M., Chen, B., Vaish, V., Horowitz, M., McDowall, I., and Bolas, M. 2004. Synthetic aperture confocal imaging. ACM Transactions on Graphics 23, 3 (Aug.), 825--834.
22. Lowe, D. 2004. Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. International Journal of Computer Vision 60, 2, 91--110.
23. Mitsunaga, T., and Nayar, S. K. 1999. Radiometric self calibration. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '99), 374--380.
24. Peleg, S., Rousso, B., Rav-Acha, A., and Zomet, A. 2000. Mosaicing on adaptive manifolds. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 22, 10, 1144--1154.
25. Pérez, P., Gangnet, M., and Blake, A. 2003. Poisson image editing. ACM Transactions on Graphics 22, 3, 313--318.
26. Rademacher, P., and Bishop, G. 1998. Multiple-center-of-projection images. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 98, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 199--206.
27. Rav-Acha, A., Shor, Y., and Peleg, S. 2004. Mosaicing with parallax using time warping. In 2004 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW'04), vol. 11.
28. Roman, A., Garg, G., and Levoy, M. 2004. Interactive design of multi-perspective images for visualizing urban landscapes. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization, 537--544.
29. Seitz, S. M., and Kim, J. 2003. Multiperspective imaging. IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications 23, 6, 16--19.
30. Snavely, N., Seitz, S., and Szeliski, R. 2006. Photo tourism: exploring photo collections in 3D. ACM Transactions on Graphics 25, 3, To appear.
31. Sun, J., Yuan, L., Jia, J., and Shum, H.-Y. 2005. Image completion with structure propagation. ACM Transactions on Graphics 24, 3 (Aug.), 861--868.
32. Szeliski, R., and Shum, H.-Y. 1997. Creating full view panoramic mosaics and environment maps. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 97, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 251--258.
33. Uyttendaele, M., Eden, A., and Szeliski, R. 2001. Eliminating ghosting and exposure artifacts in image mosaics. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 01), 509--516.
34. Wexler, Y., and Simakov, D. 2005. Space-time scene manifolds. In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'05), vol. 1, 858--863.
35. Wood, D. N., Finkelstein, A., Hughes, J. F., Thayer, C. E., and Salesin, D. H. 1997. Multiperspective panoramas for cel animation. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 97, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, 243--250.
36. Yu, J., and McMillan, L. 2004. A framework for multiperspective rendering. In Proceedings of the 15th Eurographics workshop on Rendering Techniques, 61--68.
37. Yu, J., and McMillan, L. 2004. General linear cameras. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 04), 14--27.
38. Zheng, J. Y. 2003. Digital route panoramas. IEEE MultiMedia 10, 3, 57--67.
39. Zomet, A., Feldman, D., Peleg, S., and Weinshall, D. 2003. Mosaicing new views: The crossed-slits projection. IEEE Transactions on PAMI 25, 6, 741--754.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Image and video acquisition

  • Computer graphics

    • Shape modeling

      • Parametric curve and surface models

      • Volumetric models

• Theory of computation

  • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures