Generating Seamless Stereo Mosaics From Aerial Video

This paper is directed at the development of tools for environmental science and other aerial video applications requiring the mapping of video into absolute world coordinates. As part of this effort, we propose a new method that automatically and efficiently generates seamless stereo mosaics from an aerial video camera moving over a large distance. An important part of our approach is a parallel-perspective mosaic representation that can well support large seamless mosaics and also can capture the inherent 3D information. We will show that the condition under which such stereo mosaics can be created is a rather general motion (3D rotation and translation) with a dominant direction, and the parallel-perspective stereo mosaics can be converted into a digital elevation map (DEM) after 3D recovery. A novel method PRISM (parallel-perspective ray interpolation for stereo mosaicing) is proposed to generate dense and seamless parallel-perspective stereo mosaics from sparse image sequences with motion parallax. The advantages of stereo mosaics are shown in representation, computation, 3D recovery and 3D visualization. Issues on the implementations of geo-references mosaicing as well as free mosaicing are discussed. Experimental results on several long video sequences are given