Image Mosaics

Mosaics of Everyday Environments

• Technical reports by Richard Szeliski formerly of DEC Cambridge on creation of image mosaics. See tech reports 94/1 and 94/2. The latter is most recommended, because it discusses a number of interesting uses for image mosaics; the former is focused on the problem of image registration.

• Szeliski and Shum had a nice paper on Panoramic Image Mosaicing at SIGGRAPH 97

• HTML article by Paul Haeberli and Eyal Ofek on automatic registration. Includes office interior example.

• Quicktime VR and variations

  • Apple's Quicktime VR, a product based around the use of cylindrical environment maps for navigating a virtual space. They create their panoramic mosaics by mosaicing standard photographs. See Eric Chen's SIGGRAPH 95 paper ( PDF of text of article). Ken Turkowski's work on Quicktime VR. The Quicktime VR file format.

  • GEOIMAGES: Huge collection of Quicktime VR panoramas from around the world

  • Inca sites in Quicktime VR, Studio360

  • Pictosphere, Ford Oxaal's company. Use of anamorphic panoramic images for navigation in a scene.

  • The International Quicktime VR Association who have been involved with a legal battle with a company called IPIX over QTVR-related ideas.

  • iMove does panoramas too

  • Live Picture, where Eric Chen now works, has a product much like Quicktime VR as well.

  • BeHere.com, panoramic video, i.e. non-static scenes

• Leonard McMillan of MIT has made cylindrical environment maps from panoramic image sets and has used cylindrical stereo to generate pictures from new viewpoints. See his SIGGRAPH '95 paper (available on line).

• Steve Mann of the University of Toronto has created panoramic image mosaics from video sequences shot with a wearable computer. He has HTML documents with examples of high resolution mosaics of building exteriors and interiors, and seated people, a paper that discusses automatic registration of images that differ by a projective mapping in order to create panoramic image mosaics, and other papers on related subjects.

• Paul Heckbert's master's thesis, Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping, is on the Web, but only in figure-less Postscript form and clumsy TIFF form, so if you want the whole thing, you'd be best to order a printed copy of this. If you only want selected sections, an excerpt of pages 17-21 on projective mappings, and you can view the TIFF version of pages 26-29 on panoramic image mosaics (hint: to get page 29, ask for page 35).

• Ismail Haritaoglu's article on image mosaicing, based on Szeliski's algorithm.

• Still image mosaics and video mosaics from the futuristic and platitude-laden National Information Display Laboratory.

• Image mosaicing assignment from a robotics course taught by Charles Dyer, U. of Wisconsin, Spring 1997

• Image mosaicing software at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Craig Gotsman and others.

• Painter/photographer David Hockney has done some great photocollages. See "Pearblossom Highway" here and read about it here. Kostas Terzidis created a virtual reality world inspired by that collage.

• Reinier van Kleij's panoramic mosaics of vacation in cuba, Madagascar.

• Mars Global Surveyor, high resolution altitude measurements of Mars, May 99

• Mars Pathfinder. I recommend manyrovers_full.jpg in this well-done mosaic. In Quicktime VR format. 3-D model of terrain around lander.

• National Space Science Data Center, good general starting point for space photo browsing on the Web.

• Mosaics of Mars, in particular a Sinusoidal projection of Mars about 1200 pixels wide.

• Other mosaics of Mars.

• Panoramic mosaics from Mars surface, sharp, 1200+ pixels wide.

• Mosaic of Antarctica

• Mosaics of Earth from Landsat images (nice Great Lakes mosaic).

• Explanation of how satellite image mosaics are made, for the 1-KM AVHRR Project, with pictures.

Image mosaic references not available on the Web

• A good general reference on environment maps and panoramic images is: Environment Mapping and Other Applications of World Projections, Ned Greene, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Nov. 1986.

• To create mosaics from synthetic images, or for a discussion of high quality resampling filters, see: Creating Raster Omnimax Images from Multiple Perspective Views Using The Elliptical Weighted Average Filter, Ned Greene and Paul Heckbert, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, June 1986, pp. 21-27.

15-869, Image-Based Modeling and Rendering
Paul Heckbert, Sept. 95, many links fixed Sept. 99