Real‐time generation of spherical panoramic video using an omnidirectional multi‐camera system

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for real‐time generation of seamless spherical panoramic videos from an omnidirectional multi‐camera system (OMS). Firstly, a multi‐view video alignment model called spherical projection constrained thin‐plate spline (SP‐TPS) was established and estimated using an approximately symmetrical seam‐line, maintaining the structure inconsistency around the seam‐line. Then, a look‐up table was designed to support real‐time processing of video re‐projection, video dodging and seam‐line updates. In the table, the overlapping areas in OMS multi‐view videos, the seam‐lines between spherical panoramas and OMS multi‐view videos and the pixel coordinate mapping relationship between spherical panoramas and OMS multi‐view videos were pre‐stored as a whole. Finally, a spherical panoramic video was outputted in real‐time through look‐up table computation under an ordinary GPU processor. The experiments were conducted on multi‐view video taken by “1 + 4” and “1 + 7” OMS, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with four state‐of‐the‐art methods reported in the literature and two bits of commercial software for video stitching, the proposed method excels in eliminating visual artefacts and demonstrates superior adaptability to scenes with varying depths of field. Assuming that OMS is not movable in the scene, this method can generate seamless spherical panoramic videos with a resolution of 8 K in real time, which is of great value to the surveillance field.