The spherical approach to omnidirectional visual attention

Computational visual attention (VA) has been widely investigated during the last three decades but the conventional algorithms are not suitable for omnidirectional images which often contain a significant amount of radial distortion. Only recently a computational approach was proposed that processes images in the spherical (non-Euclidian) space and produces attention maps with a direction independent homogeneous response. This paper investigates how this spherical approach applies to real scenes and particularly to different omnidirectional visual sensors. Reported experiments refer to omnidirectional images obtained from a multi-camera omnidirectional sensor as well as a parabolic and a hyperbolic catadioptric image sensor.