Automatic video mosaicing for surveillance using vanishing points

Abstract

Video surveillance typically relies on various methods of 3D scene reconstruction, such as people counting, and object detection and tracking. Video mosaicing is a related technology that enables an expanded view of a scene by pasting together frames from the video stream (superimages) of a moving single camera in real time. This technique provides better resolution than can be achieved with a conventional video camera. Well-known related applications in other fields include composition of panoramic pictures, alignment of satellite images, and generation of synthetic 360°-angle views. Given two frames of a scene, a general approach consists of finding a number of points in both images that correspond to the same objects in the scene. This makes it possible to compute a ‘transform’ that describes the geometrical relation between the views. Known as a planar homography, this transform can be obtained using robust estimation techniques on the point correspondences.