180-degree Outpainting from a Single Image

Presenting context images to a viewer's peripheral vision is one of the most effective techniques to enhance immersive visual experiences. However, most images only present a narrow view, since the field-of-view (FoV) of standard cameras is small. To overcome this limitation, we propose a deep learning approach that learns to predict a 180deg panoramic image from a narrow-view image. Specifically, we design a foveated framework that applies different strategies on near-periphery and mid-periphery regions. Two networks are trained separately, and then are employed jointly to sequentially perform narrow-to-90deg generation and 90deg-to-180deg generation. The generated outputs are then fused with their aligned inputs to produce expanded equirectangular images for viewing. Our experimental results show that single-view-to-panoramic image generation using deep learning is both feasible and promising.