Generation of animated panorama from single video sequence

Panoramic-image-based approach for representing environmental data has become a common method used by various virtual reality applications. It has many advantages over the traditional 3D modeling approaches, such as shorter generation times, faster rendering speeds, higher photorealism, and less storage needed. The drawback is however that it stores only static information of the scene. Panoramic video texture has been proposed to preserve dynamic characteristics of the natural environment, especially for outdoor sceneries. The idea is to create a seamless looping wide field-of-view video sequence. This paper presents a newly developed software program, which takes a single video sequence from a panning camera, and generates a cylindrical panorama embedded with video textures. Although the conceptual goal is different from the idea of panoramic video texture, the animated visual effects created by our approach are similar to result of panoramic video texture. While it is a fact that generating a panoramic video texture is a very time consuming task, we claim that the quality of our resulting animated panorama is satisfactory to virtual reality applications and the computation time is acceptable for practical use.