Mosaicking images with parallax

In recent years, image mosaicking has been a focus of attention of many researchers and practitioners. Existing mosaicking methods are effective only in limited cases where the camera motion is almost a pure rotation or the viewed scene is planar or very far away. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology of image mosaicking for generic 3D scenes under general camera motions. What puts the mosaicking problem to a class different from those in existing work is the parallax in the images. In this paper, we develop two heuristics for performing the geometrical image transfer. The first one uses a planar motion plus parallax together with a projective reconstruction. The second one uses projective planar patches. We provide a solution for the occlusion problem introduced by the parallax field. Examples of constructing successful mosaics from real images are shown. These experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the developed methods for registering images with parallax. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.