Visual Computing in 360°: Foundations, Challenges, and Applications

Omnidirectional media are becoming widespread with the increasing popularization of devices for capture and visualization. Unlike traditional pinhole-based images, omnidirectional images are defined on the surface of a sphere, present a full field of view, and store light intensities from a whole scene. In particular, applications exploring immersive augmented, mixed, and virtual reality experiences can strongly benefit from omnidirectional vision. Though omnidirectional images are defined on the spherical domain, they are commonly mapped to one or multiple planes. Those sphere-to-plane mappings generate distorted images, and, if directly applied, most traditional visual computing algorithms tend to present some quality degradation. This tutorial paper revises the spherical imaging model, common capture device types, and prominent representation formats. It also discusses the significant challenges of spherical visual computing and showcases the advances in three selected applications.