Quest for Graduation: Dragon Fire

Just a quick update this time; I have tutoring in an hour and plenty of Russian homework to do before then. I just finished my most recent Computer Vision assignment and thought I'd share: image mosaicking. Using matrix multiplication it is possible to warp the image of a plane to any desired perspective. By assuming the subject of a group of pictures is a plane (a good approximation when taking pictures of, say, the landscape) you can then warp images together so that they overlap properly, creating a panoramic composite image. By choosing corresponding points in the images below, I told my program how to line up the two pictures and it created the third image.

In fact, we can do better. By taking this result and feeding it to the program as one of the inputs, we can extend this panorama indefinitely.* I put a third image into it here:

Next week: Automosaicking.

~Kyle Marsh


*Pro tip: if you actually try to mosaic images all the way around a circle, you'll hit problems as you approach 180 degrees -- the program tries to map straight lines to straight lines, so it'll try to bring the vanishing point (infinity to each side) into the image. Your result will be an infinitely wide image. To actually make a full panorama you have to map the images onto a cylinder, and to do that you need to know the focal length of the camera.