Panoramic imaging has existed since the early days of photography. In those ancient times, roughly 150 years ago, it was called the art of panography, carefully putting together individual images using tape or glue to recreate a panoramic view. With the advancement of computer vision, panorama stitching became a handy tool in almost all digital cameras and mobile devices. Nowadays, creating panoramas is as simple as swiping the device or camera across the view, the stitching calculations happen immediately, and the final expanded scene is available for viewing. In this chapter, we will implement a modest panoramic image stitching application on the iPhone using OpenCV's precompiled library for iOS. We will first examine a little of the math and theory behind image stitching, choose the relevant OpenCV functions to implement it, and finally integrate it into an iOS app with a basic UI.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter...