Generalized panoramic mosaic

Video mosaicing is commonly used to increase the visual field of view by pasting together many video frames. The invention provides for image mosaicing for general camera motion, including forward camera motion and zoom. After computing the motion between the images in a sequence, strips are selected from individual frames such that the strips are approximately perpendicular to the optical flow. The strips are warped such that the optical flow becomes parallel, and are pasted to a panoramic mosaic. The warping transformation on the strips, which results in making the optical flow to be parallel, can be modeled by an oblique projection of the image onto a cylindrical surface whose central axis is the trajectory of the camera. In addition, this invention uses view interpolation to generate dense intermediate views between original video frames, such that these intermediate views are used to overcome effects of motion parallax when creating panoramic mosaics.