> FOR CONFERENCE-RELATED PAPERS, REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SESSION NUMBER, E.G., AB-02 (DOUBLE-CLICK HERE) < 1 Abstract—This paper describes an innovative compression method of panoramic images based on MPEG-7 descriptors. The proposed solution employs a detection of a series of individual video frame overlaps in order to produce concatenated panoramic images. The presented method is easy to implement even in simple devices such as low power consuming chipsets installed in remote cameras having limited power supplies. Under subjective tests it has been proved that the concatenation method allows for achieving lower transmission rates while sustaining picture quality. Index Terms—Wireless Content Distribution, Panoramic Image, MPEG-7, Edge Histogram Descriptor, Mean Opinion Score, Quality Evaluation I. INTRODUCTION ANORAMIC IMAGES are widely used in surveillance applications, scientific experiments and, most widely, in commercial applications. The commercial applications vary from simple web-based broadcasts to fully commercial TV programs. A good example of such an application is TV stations which broadcast panoramic video sequences from skiing areas in the winter season. Such applications require a slowly rotating, high-quality camera with a high-speed data link installed at mountain peaks. This often limits the applicability of such a panoramic video image source or makes its distribution extremely expensive in some difficult to access locations. The constraints are mainly found in a power supply and access to a fast data link. There are several approaches to compress sequences of panoramic images, mostly based on MPEG schemes with modifications in the motion estimation and compensation loop with epipolar geometry application, as for example [1]. Camera lenses can only acquire pictures with a narrow angle, therefore a panoramic image is usually constructed as a concatenation of several images taken by a camera rotated over its vertical axis. If a motion transmission is desired, there Manuscript received November 30, 2007. The work presented in this paper was supported by the Polish State Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the Grants No. NN517438833 and by the European Commission under the Grant No. FP6-038423 (Network of Excellence CONTENT) and FP6- FP6-028022 (Network of Excellence Euro FGI). A. Glowacz, M. Grega, P. Romaniak, and M. Leszczuk are with AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland. (e-mail: {glowacz, grega, romaniak, leszczuk}@kt.agh.edu.pl} are significant overlaps (resulting in redundancy) between consecutive frames, as a camera rotates relatively slowly. Transmission of a concatenated panoramic image (instead of a series of redundant frames) can reduce bandwidth requirements. Our motivation is to create an alternative compression method of panoramic images based on MPEG-7 descriptors which would lower the required bandwidth, thus allowing placement of panoramic cameras in locations without a proper transmission infrastructure. The proposed image compression solution will allow reducing a cost of placing panoramic cameras and conduce to a broader dissemination of such a service. In scenarios in which a bandwidth is not a constraint, the proposed compression method allows for improving quality of a received image. The paper is structured as follows: the next section describes the registration of panoramic images, introducing into the MPEG-7-based detection of image overlaps as well as the issue of transmitting images. In the third section, the quality of compression is evaluated using subjective tests. The fourth section presents the possible further extensions of the system and concludes the paper. II. NEW APPROACH TO COMPRESSION, TRANSMISSION AND DECOMPRESSION OF PANORAMIC IMAGES The architecture of the proposed solution is depicted in Fig. 1 with two paths for comparison. First, the traditional one is the transmission of an ordinary video stream (e.g. MPEG-4) from the panorama camera to a receiving end (broadcast point). The other path is the proposed solution aimed to capture several images, concatenate them into one panoramic image, and then transmit it over a wireless channel. For the need of this paper it is assumed, that the transmission over the wireless channel is lossless for the data (e.g. using the TCP protocol). After the image is transmitted it can be split into a video stream by cropping frames out of the panoramic image. The images do not have to be transmitted in real time, as for most of the applications of the remote panoramic image capture systems it is enough to update the panoramic image from time to time. The issue of panorama creation is well addressed in the literature. Some methods were proposed that combine panoramic images into a mosaic using bundle adjustment [2], Quality Evaluation of Compressed Panoramic Images Constructed using MPEG-7-Based Image Registration Andrzej Glowacz, Michal Grega, Piotr Romaniak, and Mikołaj Leszczuk P