OmniPhotos: Casual 360° VR Photography

Tobias Bertel, Mingze Yuan, Reuben Lindroos, Christian Richardt

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

44 Citations (SciVal)
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Abstract

Virtual reality headsets are becoming increasingly popular, yet it remains difficult for casual users to capture immersive 360° VR panoramas. State-of-the-art approaches require capture times of usually far more than a minute and are often limited in their supported range of head motion. We introduce OmniPhotos, a novel approach for quickly and casually capturing high-quality 360° panoramas with motion parallax. Our approach requires a single sweep with a consumer 360° video camera as input, which takes less than 3 seconds to capture with a rotating selfie stick or 10 seconds handheld. This is the fastest capture time for any VR photography approach supporting motion parallax by an order of magnitude. We improve the visual rendering quality of our OmniPhotos by alleviating vertical distortion using a novel deformable proxy geometry, which we fit to a sparse 3D reconstruction of captured scenes. In addition, the 360° input views significantly expand the available viewing area, and thus the range of motion, compared to previous approaches. We have captured more than 50 OmniPhotos and show video results for a large variety of scenes.


This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665992
Original languageEnglish
Article number266
Number of pages12
JournalACM Transactions on Graphics
Volume39
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Nov 2020
EventACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia - Online, Online, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 4 Dec 202013 Dec 2020
Conference number: 13
https://sa2020.siggraph.org/en/

Keywords

  • casual capture
  • image-based rendering
  • motion parallax
  • novel-view synthesis

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