Abstract
Omnidirectional cameras are often used with robots to provide an immersive view of the surroundings. However, robots often have unstable motion and undergo rotation. In this work, we formulate a method to stabilize the viewpoint of Omnidirectional videos by removing the rotation using dense optical flow fields. The method works by first projecting each Omnidirectional video frame on a unit sphere, measuring the optical flow at every point on the sphere, and finding the direction that minimizes its rotational component in a frame by frame manner. The Omnidirectional video is de-rotated and a 'rotation-less, translation-only' viewpoint is generated. Such a technique is well suited to work in any environment, even with sparse texture or repeating patterns where feature correspondence based methods may fail.
