Real-Time Image Mosaicing System Using a High-Frame-Rate Video Sequence

Synthesized panoramic images In this paper, we propose a real-time image mosaicing system that uses a high-frame-rate video sequence. Our proposed system can mosaic 512 × 512 color images captured at 500 fps as a single synthesized panoramic image in real time by stitching the images based on their estimated frame-to-frame changes in displacement and orientation. In the system, feature point extraction is accelerated by implementing a parallel processing circuit module for Harris corner detection, and hundreds of selected feature points in the current frame can be simultaneously corresponded with those in their neighbor ranges in the previous frame, assuming that frame-to-frame image displacement becomes smaller in high-speed vision. The efficacy of our system for improved feature-based real-time image mosaicing at 500 fps was verified by implementing it on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based high-speed vision platform and conducting several experiments: (1) capturing an indoor scene using a camera mounted on a fast-moving two-degrees-of-freedom active vision, (2) capturing an outdoor scene using a hand-held camera that was rapidly moved in a periodic fashion by hand.