Abstract: Methods, systems, and articles of manufacture for generating a panoramic image of a long scene are disclosed. These include, fitting planes to 3D points associated with input images of portions of the long scene, where respective planes are fitted to a ground surface, a dominant surface, and at least one of foreground objects and background objects, and where distances from the 3D points to the fitted planes are minimized. These also include, selecting, for respective pixels in the panoramic image, an input image and a fitted plane such that a distance is minimized from the selected the fitted plane to a surface corresponding to the pixels and occlusion of the pixels is reduced in the selected input image, and stitching by projecting the selected input image using the selected fitted plane into the virtual camera.