Stereo panorama with a single camera

Abstract

Full panoramic images, covering 360 degrees, can be created either by using panoramic cameras or by mosaicing together many regular images. Creating panoramic views in stereo, where one panorama is generated for the left eye, and another panorama is generated for the right eye is more problematic. Earlier attempts to mosaic images from a rotating pair of stereo cameras faced severe problems of parallax and of scale changes. A new family of multiple viewpoint image projections, the Circular Projections, is developed. Two panoramic images taken using such projections can serve as a panoramic stereo pair. A system is described to generates a stereo panoramic image using circular projections from images or video taken by a single rotating camera. The system works in real-time on a PC. It should be noted that the stereo images are created without computation of 3D structure, and the depth effects are created only in the viewer's brain.