London, May 5 (IANS) Want to create one video out of several video feeds in a professional way? A new Disney technology will now help even amateurish videographers create high-quality video panoramas using multiple cameras.
The algorithm developed by the team at Disney Research Zurich uses as many as 14 various types of cameras, generating panoramic video in the order of tens to more than 100 megapixels.
The method smooths out the blurring, ghosting and other distortions that routinely occur when video feeds from unstructured camera arrays are combined to create a single panoramic video.
The algorithm corrects for the apparent difference in position of an object caused by different camera angles — known as parallax — and image warping that occurs because of slight timing differences between cameras.
Both of these are known to lead to visible discontinuities, ghosting and other imperfections in existing approaches.
“We can foresee a day when just about anyone could create a high-quality video panorama by setting up a few video cameras or even linking several smartphones, just as many people today can easily create a still photo panorama with their smartphones,” explained Alexander Sorkine-Hornung, senior research scientist at Disney Research Zurich.
Combining video feeds enables the creation of video panoramas beyond the resolution of any one camera.
Though combining or stitching separate still images into one is a technique as old as photography, stitching together video feeds remains a difficult challenge due to parallax changing over time.
The new technique automatically analyses the images from the cameras to estimate the position and alignment of each camera. This eliminates the need to use special or manual calibration techniques and allows for a flexible positioning of the cameras.
The algorithm corrects for differences in parallax that create ghosting and other disturbing effects in the areas of the panorama where images from separate cameras are stitched together.
It also detects and corrects for image warping — wavy lane markings on roads, or buildings that appear to bend over — that occurs when images are stitched together.
Finally, the technique also compensates for slight differences in the timing of frames between cameras, which otherwise causes jitter and other artefacts in the image.
The findings were scheduled to be presented at “EUROGRAPHICS 2015”, the annual conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics in Zurich, Switzerland this week.