GENERALIZED PANORAMIC MOSAIC

A method for combining a sequence of two-dimensional images of a scene to construct a panoramic mosaic of the scene has a sequence of images acquired by a camera with relative motion to the scene. The relative motion gives rise to an optical flow between the images. The images are warped so that the optical flow becomes substantially parallel to a direction in which the mosaic is constructed and pasted so that the sequence of the images is continuous for the scene to construct the panoramic mosaic of the scene. For this, the images are projected onto a three-dimensional cylinder having a major axis that approximates the path of an optical center of the camera. The combination of the images is achieved by translating the projected two-dimensional images substantially along the cylindrical surface of the three-dimensional cylinder.