High quality stereo panorama generation using a 3 camera system

A method for high quality stereo panorama mosaicing is presented. The surrounding scene is captured by our original 3-camera system as stereo moving picture sequences, and the images are stitched after improvement of the texture quality. The multi-purpose 3-camera system features accurate frame synchronization between 3 channels, and can be used outdoors through battery operation. For registration of panorama stitching, under the newly investigated distortion-free condition, Affine parameters are estimated through the overlapped areas by the steepest descent algorithm. The texture improvement has two steps, one is vertical resolution recovery by field integration, and the other is image enhancement by two dimensional quadratic Volterra filter which satisfies Weber-Fechner's law. The presented method enables high quality stereo mosaicing with accurate mutual disparities between the channels and without visible distortion of textures.