Abstract
Spherical images are particularly adapted to develop virtual tours of heritage monuments. While Lidar scanning, photogrammetry and rotating camera systems can lead to produce spherical images, compact dual-fisheye cameras are accurate enough for many uses, such as virtual tour, and easy to use by a non-expert. Classical methods require the images to be placed manually on a blueprint of the environment.
%But the classical software consider placing a few images manually on the blueprint of the environment.
Then, the user navigation in the virtual monument is limited to generated transitions between a few locations.
Instead of a few pictures, this paper considers a spherical video recorded while walking within a monument and illustrates how to explore spatial dimensions of the environment where the video was taken, beyond the time scroll-bar. To this end, spherical visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) and the alignment of the resulting map to an architectural blueprint are combined to create a spatio-temporal virtual tour from a video.
Demonstration
The concept is demonstrated on the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez, Morocco, with access to the virtual tour interface at this link.
