Panoramic video stitching from commodity HDTV cameras

Digital camera and smartphone technologies have made high-quality images and video pervasive and abundant. Combining or stitching collections of images from a variety of viewpoints into an extended panoramic image is a common and popular function for such devices. Extending this functionality to video however, poses many new challenges due to the demand for both spatial and temporal continuity. Multi-view video stitching (also called panoramic video stitching) is an emerging, common research area in computer vision, image/video processing and computer graphics and has wide applications in virtual reality, virtual tourism, surveillance, and human computer interaction. In this paper, we study and solve the major technical and practical problems in the complete process of stitching a high-resolution multi-view video into a high-resolution panoramic video. The challenges addressed include video stabilization, efficient high-definition multi-view video alignment and stitching, color correction, and blurred frame detection and repair. The proposed approaches have been successfully applied in a high-quality virtual reality system—the Virtual Exercise Environment (VEE) system.