Disparity-preserving image rectangularization for stereoscopic panorama

Abstract

This study aims at generating a long strip stereoscopic panorama with a rectangular boundary from a stereoscopic video. The issues arising from this goal are how to automatically select appropriate frames to reduce geometric distortion in image stitching, how to preserve disparity under image warping, and how to generate a rectangular panoramic stereoscopic image without the loss of boundary information. To deal with these issues and to generate visually smooth stereoscopic panorama, a disparity-aware image warping is proposed. Moreover, the image warping method is performed on the irregular left and right panoramic images simultaneously with a hybrid control mesh to generate a rectangular panorama while preserving the spatial shape and disparity as much as possible. Experimental results on various stereo video contents show that the proposed method can effectively preserve both the spatial shapes and pixel disparity.