An omnidirectional image unwrapping approach

Omnidirectional vision has received a particular interest in many computer vision applications such as video-conference, video surveillance and Robotic navigation. Omnidirectional vision systems can provide images with 360° as field of view. In various applications, it is useful to unwrap the obtained images to panoramic images which are more adapted to human visual system. The unwrapped images can be obtained by converting polar coordinates to Cartesian coordinates. However, this technique affects the size and the resolution of the output image. As effect, the image quality is degraded. To overcome this problem we present an improvement of this technique using nearest-neighbor interpolation method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is effective to enhance the quality of unwrapped panoramic images.