A geodesic-preserving method for image warping

The manipulation of panoramic/wide-angle images is usually achieved via image warping. Though various techniques have been developed for preserving shapes and straight lines for warping, these are not sufficient for panoramic/wide-angle images. The image projections will turn the straight lines into curved “geodesic lines”, and it is fundamentally impossible to keep all these lines straight. In this work, we propose a geodesic-preserving method for content-aware image warping. An energy term is introduced to preserve the geodesic appearance of the geodesic lines, and can be used with shape-preserving terms. Our method is demonstrated in various applications, including rectangling panoramas, resizing panoramic/wide-angle images, and wide-angle image manipulation. An extension to ellipse preservation for general images is also presented.