Image Stitching with Locally Shared Rotation Axis

Daniel Barath, Yaqing Ding, Zuzana Kukelova, Viktor Larsson

Abstract: We consider the problem of stitching image sequences with cameras undergoing pure rotational motion. We leverage the assumption of a locally constant rotation axis, i.e., neighboring frames have a shared but unknown rotation axis. This assumption holds in many common image capturing scenarios, e.g., panoramic sweeping motions. Using this additional constraint, we develop techniques for three-view camera rotation estimation; a minimal solver for the two-view estimation with a known rotation axis; and a globally optimal robust estimator for the two-view case. We show on publicly available datasets that the proposed methods lead to camera rotation estimation superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy with comparable run-time. The source code will be made available.