Image cube trajectory analysis for 3D reconstruction of concentric mosaics

We present a new concept for the extension of epipolar image analysis to more general camera configurations like circular camera movements usu-ally occuring for concentric mosaic acquisition. The robust method for 3D scene depth reconstruc-tion which we call Image Cube Trajectory Analysis (ICT) is no longer restricted to horizontal, linear, and equidistant camera movements but works with arbitrary camera configurations. Similar to epipo-lar image analysis, the algorithm uses all available views of an image sequence simultaneously. In-stead of searching for straight lines in the epipo-lar image, we explicitly compute the trajectories of particular points through the image cube. Varia-tion of the unknown depth leads to different curves. The best match is assumed to correspond to the true depth. It is selected by evaluating color constancy along the curve. For the example of concentric mo-saics, we derive an occlusion compatible ordering scheme that guarantees an optimal processing of oc-cluding object points during the ICT analysis. Figure 1: Slices from the concentric mosaic Moche.