Stereo Image Rectification for Simple Panoramic Image Generation

In this paper, we propose an image rectification method to generate panoramic views from stereoscopic images. Due to different intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of stereoscopic cameras, there are some mismatches in the vertical direction of the stereo images and they become major obstacles to make a panoramic image. Therefore, we need to reduce mismatches to generate more natural panoramic views. Since the distance between two cameras is relatively large for panoramic image generation, we perform two different camera calibration operations: relative calibration and non-relative calibration. After we calculate a rectifying transformation by estimating the camera parameters of the rectified images and apply it to the captured images, we can generate a panoramic image from the rectified stereo images. Experimental results show that the proposed method is useful for panoramic image generation and provides us much clearer panoramic view with fewer mismatch regions.