A Geodesic-Preserving Method for Image Warping

Dongping Li, Kaiming He, Jian Sun, Kun Zhou; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 213-221

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.