# Tangent Images for Mitigating Spherical Distortion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.09390 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09390/

## Key facts

- Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [PanoFormer: Panorama Transformer for Indoor 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09283/) (2022)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [OmniFusion: 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Geometry-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00838/) (2022)
- [360MonoDepth: High-Resolution 360deg Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15669/) (2021)
- [Both Style and Distortion Matter: Dual-Path Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14360/) (2023)
- [Behind Every Domain There is a Shift: Adapting Distortion-aware Vision Transformers for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11860/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Omnidirectional Vision: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10468/) (2022)
- [HRDFuse: Monocular 360degDepth Estimation by Collaboratively Learning Holistic-with-Regional Depth Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11616/) (2023)
- [Surround-view Fisheye Camera Perception for Automated Driving: Overview, Survey and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13281/) (2022)
- [Semantics, Distortion, and Style Matter: Towards Source-free UDA for Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12505/) (2024)
- [Elite360D: Towards Efficient 360 Depth Estimation via Semantic- and Distance-Aware Bi-Projection Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16376/) (2024)
- [360SFUDA++: Towards Source-free UDA for Panoramic Segmentation by Learning Reliable Category Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16501/) (2024)
- [SGAT4PASS: Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03403/) (2023)
- [Scalable and Equivariant Spherical CNNs by Discrete-Continuous (DISCO) Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13603/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [PDO-eS2CNNs: Partial Differential Operator Based Equivariant Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03584/) (2021)
- [PanelNet: Understanding 360 Indoor Environment via Panel Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09078/) (2023)
- [360BEV: Panoramic Semantic Mapping for Indoor Bird's-Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11910/) (2023)
- [Single Frame Semantic Segmentation Using Multi-Modal Spherical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09369/) (2023)
- [Panoramic Vision Transformer for Saliency Detection in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08956/) (2022)
- [SphereUFormer: A U-Shaped Transformer for Spherical 360 Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06968/) (2024)
- [Complementary Bi-directional Feature Compression for Indoor 360deg Semantic Segmentation with Self-distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02437/) (2022)
- [FreDSNet: Joint Monocular Depth and Semantic Segmentation with Fast Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01595/) (2022)
- [High-Resolution Depth Estimation for 360-degree Panoramas through Perspective and Panoramic Depth Images Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10414/) (2022)
- [3D Scene Geometry Estimation from 360^circ Imagery: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09252/) (2024)
- [Dream360: Diverse and Immersive Outdoor Virtual Scene Creation via Transformer-Based 360 Image Outpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10564/) (2024)
- [SGFormer: Spherical Geometry Transformer for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14979/) (2024)
- [Geometry Fidelity for Spherical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18207/) (2024)
- [PanoSplatt3R: Leveraging Perspective Pretraining for Generalized Unposed Wide-Baseline Panorama Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21960/) (2025)
- [360deg Optical Flow using Tangent Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14331/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we propose "tangent images," a spherical image representation that facilitates transferable and scalable 360^circ computer vision. Inspired by techniques in cartography and computer graphics, we render a spherical image to a set of distortion-mitigated, locally-planar image grids tangent to a subdivided icosahedron. By varying the resolution of these grids independently of the subdivision level, we can effectively represent high resolution spherical images while still benefiting from the low-distortion icosahedral spherical approximation. We show that training standard convolutional neural networks on tangent images compares favorably to the many specialized spherical convolutional kernels that have been developed, while also scaling efficiently to handle significantly higher spherical resolutions. Furthermore, because our approach does not require specialized kernels, we show that we can transfer networks trained on perspective images to spherical data without fine-tuning and with limited performance drop-off. Finally, we demonstrate that tangent images can be used to improve the quality of sparse feature detection on spherical images, illustrating its usefulness for traditional computer vision tasks like structure-from-motion and SLAM.