Omni-directional images are becoming more prevalent for understanding the scene of all directions around a camera, as they provide a much wider field-of-view (FoV) compared to conventional images. In this work, we present a novel approach to represent omni-directional images and suggest how to apply CNNs on the proposed image representation. The proposed image representation method utilizes a spherical polyhedron to reduce distortion introduced inevitably when sampling pixels on a non-Euclidean spherical surface around the camera center. To apply convolution operation on our representation of images, we stack the neighboring pixels on top of each pixel and multiply with trainable parameters. This approach enables us to apply the same CNN architectures used in conventional euclidean 2D images on our proposed method in a straightforward manner. Compared to the previous work, we additionally compare different designs of kernels that can be applied to our proposed method. We also show that our method outperforms in monocular depth estimation task compared to other state-of-the-art representation methods of omni-directional images. In addition, we propose a novel method to fit bounding ellipses of arbitrary orientation using object detection networks and apply it to an omni-directional real-world human detection dataset.

Omni-directional cameras have many advantages over conventional cameras in that they have a much wider field-of-view (FOV). Accordingly, several approaches have been proposed recently to apply convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to omni-directional images for various visual tasks. However, most of them use image representations defined in the Euclidean space after transforming the omni-directional views originally formed in the non-Euclidean space. This transformation leads to shape distortion due to nonuniform spatial resolving power and the loss of continuity. These effects make existing convolution kernels experience difficulties in extracting meaningful information. This paper presents a novel method to resolve such problems of applying CNNs to omni-directional images. The proposed method utilizes a spherical polyhedron to represent omni-directional views. This method minimizes the variance of the spatial resolving power on the sphere surface, and includes new convolution and pooling methods for the proposed representation. The proposed method can also be adopted by any existing CNN-based methods. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated through classification, detection, and semantic segmentation tasks with synthetic and real datasets.