Swung-to-Cylinder Projection for Panoramic Image Viewing

Abstract

This paper proposes the swung-to-cylinder projection model for mapping a sphere to a plane, which is useful for viewing 360 panoramic images. Our model extends the swung-to-plane model and consists of two steps. In the first step, the sphere is projected onto a swung surface. In the second step, the projected image on the swung surface is mapped onto a cylinder through the perspective projection. The proposed model is simple, efficient and easy to control. Similar to the swung-to-plane model, it makes a better compromise between distortion minimization and line preserving. However, it does not suffer from the distortion problem of the swung-to-plane model when viewing full 360 panoramic images.