Fast construction of dynamic and multi-resolution 360° panoramas from video sequences

This paper presents a unified approach to automatically build dynamic and multi-resolution 360° panoramic (DMP) representations from image sequences captured by hand-held cameras mainly undertaking rotation and zooming for natural scenes with moving targets. A simple (yet stable) rigid motion model and a closed-loop-based mosaicing algorithm are proposed to generate cylindrical mosaics automatically. Multi-resolution representations are built for interesting areas by separating zooming sub-sequences from a pan/zoom sequence. Moving objects are detected and separated from images based on motion information, and then more accurate contours are extracted using a modified active contour algorithm. The DMP construction method is fast, robust, and automatic, achieving five frames per second for image sequences with 384×288 color images on a Pentium III 800 MHz PC. The construction of the DMP representation can be used in virtual reality, video surveillance, and very low bit-rate video coding.