Feature-less Stitching of Cylindrical Tunnel
This addresses the problem of immersive environment creation for end users in scenarios like tunnel inspection using UAVs, but it appears incremental as it adapts existing geometric and rendering techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of creating panoramic images in enclosed environments like tunnels where traditional image stitching fails due to camera movement, by using known scene geometry and camera trajectory to generate cylindrical images and composite them into a 3D immersive environment in Unity. The result is a method that enables UAV-captured video sequences to be stitched without relying on feature detection, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
Traditional image stitching algorithms use transforms such as homography to combine different views of a scene. They usually work well when the scene is planar or when the camera is only rotated, keeping its position static. This severely limits their use in real world scenarios where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) potentially hovers around and flies in an enclosed area while rotating to capture a video sequence. We utilize known scene geometry along with recorded camera trajectory to create cylindrical images captured in a given environment such as a tunnel where the camera rotates around its center. The captured images of the inner surface of the given scene are combined to create a composite panoramic image that is textured onto a 3D geometrical object in Unity graphical engine to create an immersive environment for end users.