A unified panoramic stitching and multi-projector rendering scheme for immersive panoramic displays

Panoramic videos provide a high resolution wide-angle field of view to audience. The rendering of such panoramic videos on large multi-projector curved displays further enhances the experience by providing them an immersive visual environment. Immersive panoramic projection thus comprise of three steps: acquisition of videos, stitching of video frames and their projection using multi-projector display system. Both panoramic stitching and multi-projector rendering require compute intensive geometric and photometric transformations that have to be applied for each frame of a video during stitching as well as rendering process. In this paper, we propose a unified scheme that handles these two separate geometric transformations using a single, combined Look up Table (LUT). The scheme allows projection of planar and cylindrical panoramas on curved cylindrical displays. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides a speedup of up to 73% and 83% for projector resolutions of HD and 4K respectively, for a two-camera two-projector panoramic display system. Furthermore, for a 4K projector, the proposed scheme requires 2.278 ms for the geometric transformation of its content, thus enabling real time panoramic video projection. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.