Revolvable Indoor Panoramas Using a Rectified Azimuthal Projection
This work addresses a specific need in computer graphics for indoor scene visualization, offering an incremental improvement over existing projection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of converting indoor spherical panoramas into overhead-view photographs with an extremely wide field of view up to 4π steradians, by introducing a novel azimuthal map projection that blends between stereographic and Lambert projections to control distortions and produce superior results.
We present an algorithm for converting an indoor spherical panorama into a photograph with a simulated overhead view. The resulting image will have an extremely wide field of view covering up to 4π steradians of the spherical panorama. We argue that our method complements the stereographic projection commonly used in the "little planet" effect. The stereographic projection works well in creating little planets of outdoor scenes; whereas our method is a well-suited counterpart for indoor scenes. The main innovation of our method is the introduction of a novel azimuthal map projection that can smoothly blend between the stereographic projection and the Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection. Our projection has an adjustable parameter that allows one to control and compromise between distortions in shape and distortions in size within the projected panorama. This extra control parameter gives our projection the ability to produce superior results over the stereographic projection.