Background estimation for a single omnidirectional image sequence captured with a moving camera

This paper proposes a background estimation method from a single omnidirectional image sequence for removing undesired regions such as moving objects, specular regions, and uncaptured regions caused by the camera’s blind spot without manual specification. The proposed method aligns multiple frames using a reconstructed 3D model of the environment and generates background images by minimizing an energy function for selecting a frame for each pixel. In the energy function, we introduce patch similarity and camera positions to remove undesired regions more correctly and generate high-resolution images. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the result given by the proposed method with those from conventional approaches.

IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications, 6:68-72