Therefore, it is desirable if the global
motion model we need to recover is translation, which has only two parameters.
It turns out that for a pure panning motion, if we convert two images to their
cylindrical maps with known focal length, the relationship between them can be
represented by a translation.
Here is an example of how cylindrical maps
are constructed with differently with f’s. Note how straight lines are curved.
Similarly, we can map an image to its longitude/latitude spherical
coordinates as well if f is given.