Creating cylindrical panoramic mosaic from a pipeline video

In geological engineering, stratum structure detection is a fundamental problem in project planning and implementation. One of the most commonly employed detection technologies is to take videos of borehole using a forward moving camera. Following this approach, the problem of stratum structure detection is transformed into the problem of constructing a panoramic image from the taken video sequences, which are typically in low quality. In this paper, we propose a novel method to create a panoramic image of the borehole from the video sequence without camera calibration and tracking. To stitch together pixels of neighboring frame images, our camera model is designed with a focal length changing feature, along with a small rotation freedom in the two-dimensional image space. Essentially, our camera model assumes target objects lie on a cylindrical wall and the camera moves forward along the central axis of the cylindrical wall. Our method robustly resolves these two degrees-of-freedoms through KLT feature tracking and constructs a panoramic image by stitching strips. Experiment results show that our method could efficiently generate high-quality panoramas for very long video sequences.