Stitching video from webcams

Abstract

This paper presents a technique to create wide field-of-view from common webcams. Our system consists of two stages: the initialization stage and the real-time stage. In the first stage, we detect robust features in the initial frame of each webcam and find the corresponding points between them. Then the matched point pairs are employed to compute the perspective matrix which describes the geometric relationship of the adjacent views. After the initialization stage, we register the frame sequences of different webcams on the same plane using the perspective matrix and synthesize the overlapped region using a nonlinear blending method in real time. In this way, the narrow fields of each webcam are displayed together as one wide scene. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a prototype that consists of two ordinary webcams and show that this is an interesting and inexpensive way to experience the wide-angle observation. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.