Ztitch: A mobile phone application for immersive panorama creation, navigation, and social sharing

This paper presents the design of Ztitch, a mobile phone application that can create immersive panoramic scenes in real time, where multiple photos are arranged in the 3D space according to their camera poses, maintaining a realistic perspective of the scene. By taking full advantage of the touchscreen, accelerometer, and gyroscope in the phone, Ztitch allows users to easily fine-tune each photo´s position, navigate the scene, and edit the scenes created by others. When there is a undesired gap or overlap between the two ends of a 360° immersive panorama due to unknown camera focal length or accumulated errors, a fast and accurate algorithm is developed to jointly adjust the entire sequence to achieve the desired panorama. This is again achieved by leveraging the touchscreen of the phone. In addition, a fast color-balancing and exposure-compensation technique is developed to blend neighboring images.