Rich360: optimized spherical representation from structured panoramic camera arrays

Jungjin Lee, Bumki Kim, Kyehyun Kim, Younghui Kim, Jun-yong Noh

Abstract: This paper presents Rich360, a novel system for creating and viewing a 360° panoramic video obtained from multiple cameras placed on a structured rig. Rich360 provides an as-rich-as-possible 360° viewing experience by effectively resolving two issues that occur in the existing pipeline. First, a deformable spherical projection surface is utilized to minimize the parallax from multiple cameras. The surface is deformed spatio-temporally according to the depth constraints estimated from the overlapping video regions. This enables fast and efficient parallax-free stitching independent of the number of views. Next, a non-uniform spherical ray sampling is performed. The density of the sampling varies depending on the importance of the image region. Finally, for interactive viewing, the non-uniformly sampled video is mapped onto a uniform viewing sphere using a UV map. This approach can preserve the richness of the input videos when the resolution of the final 360° panoramic video is smaller than the overall resolution of the input videos, which is the case for most 360° panoramic videos. We show various results from Rich360 to demonstrate the richness of the output video and the advancement in the stitching results.