* This work was done when Huiwen was an intern in MSRA, as an undergraduate student.

Abstract

Stitched panoramic images mostly have irregular boundaries. Artists and common users generally prefer rectangular boundaries, which can be obtained through cropping or image completion techniques. In this paper, we present a content-aware warping algorithm that generates rectangular images from stitched panoramic images. Our algorithm consists of two steps. The first local step is mesh-free and preliminarily warps the image into a rectangle. With a grid mesh placed on this rectangle, the second global step optimizes the mesh to preserve shapes and straight lines. In various experiments we demonstrate that the results of our approach are often visually plausible, and the introduced distortion is often unnoticeable.