Cube2Video: Navigate between
Cubic Panoramas in Real-Time

Qiang Zhao       Liang Wan       Wei Feng       Jiawan Zhang       Tien-Tsin Wong

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 15, No. 8, pp. 1745-1754, December 2013.

Ground truth

Our method

Shi et al. 2009

Kolhatkar et al. 2010

Zhang et al. 2011

Abstract

Online virtual navigation systems enable users to hop from one 360° panorama to another, which belong to a sparse point-to-point collection, resulting in a less pleasant viewing experience. In this paper, we present a novel method, namely Cube2Video, to support navigating between cubic panoramas in a video-viewing mode. Our method circumvents the intrinsic challenge of cubic panoramas, i.e., the discontinuities between cube faces, in an efficient way. The proposed method extends the matching-triangulation-interpolation procedure with special considerations of the spherical domain. A triangle-to-triangle homography-based warping is developed to achieve physically plausible and visually pleasant interpolation results. The temporal smoothness of the synthesized video sequence is improved by means of a compensation transformation. As experimental results demonstrate, our method can synthesize pleasant video sequences in real time, thus mimicking walking or driving navigation.

Paper

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Video

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BibTex:

@article{zhao-2013-cube2video,
    author   = {Qiang Zhao and Liang Wan and Wei Feng
                  and Jiawan Zhang and Tien-Tsin Wong},
    title    = {Cube2Video: Navigate between Cubic
                  Panoramas in Real-Time},
    journal  = {IEEE Transactions on Multimedia},
    year     = {2013},
    volume   = {15},
    number   = {8},
    pages    = {1745-1754},
}