Constructing image panoramas using dual-homography warping

This paper describes a method to construct seamless image mosaics of a panoramic scene containing two predominate planes: a distant back plane and a ground plane that sweeps out from the camera's location. While this type of panorama can be stitched when the camera is carefully rotated about its optical center, such ideal scene capture is hard to perform correctly. Existing techniques use a single homography per image to perform alignment followed by seam cutting or image blending to hide inevitable alignments artifacts. In this paper, we demonstrate how to use two homographies per image to produce a more seamless image. Specifically, our approach blends the homographies in the alignment procedure to perform a nonlinear warping. Once the images are geometrically stitched, they are further processed to blend seams and reduce curvilinear visual artifacts due to the nonlinear warping. As demonstrated in our paper, our procedure is able to produce results for this type of scene where current state-of-the-art techniques fail.