Generation and Error Characterization of Pararell-Perspective Stereo Mosaics from Real Video

There have been attempts in a variety of applications to add 3D information into an image-based mosaic representation. Creating stereo mosaics from two rotating cameras was proposed by [Huang & Hung, 1998], and from a single off-center rotating camera by [Ishiguro, et al, 1990], [Peleg & Ben-Ezra, 1999], and by [Shum & Szeliski, 1999]. In these kinds of stereo mosaics, however, viewpoints — therefore the parallax — are limited to images taken from a very small area. Recently our work at UMass ([Zhu, et al, 1999, Zhu, et al, 2001a, Zhu, et al, 2001b]) has been focused on parallel-perspective stereo mosaics from a dominantly translating camera, which is the typical prevalent sensor motion during aerial surveys. A rotating camera can be easily controlled to achieve the desired motion. On the contrary, the translation of a camera over a large distance is much harder to achieve in real vision applications such as robot navigation ([Zheng & Tsuji, 1992]) and environmental monitoring ([Kumar, et al, 1995, Schultz, et al, 2000, Zhu, et al, 2001a]). In an applications to environmental monitoring, we have previously shown ([Zhu, et al, 1999, Zhu, et aI, 2001a, Zhu, et al, 2001b]) that image mosaicing from a translating camera raises a set of different problems from that of circular projections of a rotating camera.