High-Resolution Depth Estimation for 360° Panoramas through Perspective and Panoramic Depth Images Registration

We propose a novel approach to compute high-resolution (2048x1024 and higher) depths for panoramas that is significantly faster and qualitatively and qualitatively more accurate than the current state-of-the-art method [23]. As traditional neural network-based methods have limitations in the output image sizes (up to 1024x512) due to GPU memory constraints, both [23] and our method rely on stitching multiple perspective disparity or depth images to come out a unified panoramic depth map. However, to achieve globally consistent stitching, [23] relied on solving extensive disparity map alignment and Poisson-based blending problems, leading to high computation time. Instead, we propose to use an existing panoramic depth map (computed in realtime by any panorama-based method) as the common target for the individual perspective depth maps to register to. This key idea made producing globally consistent stitching results from a straightforward task. Our experiments show that our method generates qualitatively better results than existing panorama-based methods, and further outperforms them quantitatively on datasets unseen by these methods.