360 Panorama Cloning on Sphere

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for cloning patches in spherical panoramic images directly in the spherical domain, addressing geometric constraints and artifacts, and achieving real-time, visually pleasing results.

Contribution

It presents a coordinate-based spherical cloning method that handles large patches and preserves orientation without boundary detection or planar unwrapping.

Findings

Produces visually pleasing cloning results

Operates in real time

Handles large patches with minimal artifacts

Abstract

In this paper, we address a novel problem of cloning a patch of the source spherical panoramic image to the target spherical panoramic image, which we call 360 panorama cloning. Considering the sphere geometry constraint embedded in spherical panoramic images, we develop a coordinate-based method that directly clones in the spherical domain. Our method neither differentiates the polar regions and equatorial regions, nor identifies the boundaries in the unrolled planar-formatted panorama. We discuss in depth two unique issues in panorama cloning, i.e. preserving the patch's orientation, and handling the large-patch cloning (covering over 180 field of view) which may suffer from discoloration artifacts. As experimental results demonstrate, our method is able to get visually pleasing cloning results and achieve real time cloning performance.