Augmenting panoramas with object movies by generating novel views with disparity‐based view morphing

Our goal is to augment a panorama with object movies in a visually 3D‐consistent way. Notice that a panorama is recorded as one single 2D image and an object movie (OM) is composed of a set of 2D images taken around a 3D object. The challenge is how to integrate the above two sources of 2D images in a 3D‐consistent way so that the user can easily manipulate object movies in a panorama. To solve this problem, we adopt a purely image‐based approach that does not have to reconstruct the geometric models of the 3D objects to be inserted in the panorama. A critical issue of this method is how to generate the novel views required for showing an OM in different places of a panorama, and we have proposed a view morphing technique, called t ‐DBVM, to solve this problem. Our experiments have shown that this purely image‐based approach can effectively generate visually convincing OM‐augmented panoramas. This method has great potential for many applications that require integration of panoramas and object movies, such as virtual malls, virtual museum, and interior design. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.