Real-Time Panoramic Depth Maps from Omni-directional Stereo Images for 6 DoF Videos in Virtual Reality

In this paper we present an approach for 6 DoF panoramic videos from omni-directional stereo (ODS) images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). More specifically, we use CNNs to generate panoramic depth maps from ODS images in real-time. These depth maps would then allow for re-projection of panoramic images thus providing 6 DoF to a viewer in virtual reality (VR). As the boundaries of a panoramic image must touch in order to envelope a viewer, we introduce a border weighted loss function as well as new error metrics specifically tailored for panoramic images. We show experimentally that training with our border weighted loss function improves performance by benchmarking a baseline skip-connected encoder-decoder style network as well as other state-of-the-art methods in depth map estimation from mono and stereo images. Finally, a practical application for VR using real world data is also demonstrated.