Online Panorama Image Generation for a Disaster Rescue Vehicle

Abstract

We introduce our online panorama generation system for armored rescue vehicles in an extreme disaster. To make the whole system fireproof and heatproof, all the cameras are embedded around the vehicle body, and this makes the panorama stitching suffer from binocular parallax. Because vehicle and remote operators should observe its current surroundings, the panorama image should be generated online in an acceptable time. We explain how to calculate the initial alignment of input camera image on the cylindrical canvas in advance, and how to merge the overlapped image by removing the binocular parallax. Structures for the data transfer is also discussed. Experiments show that the current implementation can generate and share the panoramic image with remote operators successfully.