Abstract

We present direct featureless methods for estimating the eight parameters of an "exact" projective (homographic) coordinate transformation to register pairs of images, together with the application of seamlessly combining a plurality of images of the same scene, resulting in a single image (or new image sequence) of greater resolution or spatial extent. The approach is "exact" for two cases of static scenes: 1) images taken from the same location of an arbitrary three-dimensional (3-D) scene, with a camera that is free to pan, tilt, rotate about its optical axis, and zoom, or 2) images of a flat scene taken from arbitrary locations. The featureless projective approach generalizes interframe camera motion estimation methods that have previously used an affine model (which lacks the degrees of freedom to "exactly" characterize such phenomena as camera pan and tilt) and/or which have relied upon finding points of correspondence between the image frames. The featureless projective approach...

Citations