Manifold Modeling and Its Application to Tubular Scene Manifold Mosaicing Algorithm

Manifold mosaicing is arguably the most important class of image mosaicing methods. The existing manifold mosaicing methods work reasonably well only for scenes with simple plane structure and for images taken in a usual way such that the camera's motion direction is perpendicular to its optical axis. A novel manifold modeling theoretical framework is presented to unify the current image mosaicing methods. Based on this framework, an effective mosaicing algorithm is also proposed to mosaic tubular scenes which have failed most existing methods. We adopt a two-step shaping strategy to parallelize the optical flows and change the topological genus of the image strips by Mobius mappings and circular ring extending. We performed computational experiments via image sequences acquired from tubular scenes and obtained excellent panoramas. The theoretical framework and algorithms in this paper have immediate applications to many practical tubular scene mosaicing problems in medical imaging, industrial inspection, gaming, virtual reality and robotics.