# Correcting Face Distortion in Wide-Angle Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Synthetic Depth-of-Field with a Single-Camera Mobile Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04171/) (2018)
- [Shallow and Deep Convolutional Networks for Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00845/) (2016)
- [Document Rectification and Illumination Correction using a Patch-based CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09470/) (2019)
- [FishEyeRecNet: A Multi-Context Collaborative Deep Network for Fisheye Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04784/) (2018)
- [Can You Read Me Now? Content Aware Rectification using Angle Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02231/) (2020)
- [Learning Perspective Undistortion of Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07515/) (2019)
- [Real-time Hair Segmentation and Recoloring on Mobile GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06740/) (2019)
- [Steadiface: Real-Time Face-Centric Stabilization on Mobile Phones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01382/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Semi-Supervised Coupled Thin-Plate Spline Model for Rotation Correction and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13432/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End Depth-Based Pipeline for Selfie Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19189/) (2024)
- [Beyond Wide-Angle Images: Structure-to-Detail Video Portrait Correction via Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00401/) (2025)
- [Otter: Mitigating Background Distractions of Wide-Angle Few-Shot Action Recognition with Enhanced RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06741/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video blogs and selfies are popular social media formats, which are often captured by wide-angle cameras to show human subjects and expanded background. Unfortunately, due to perspective projection, faces near corners and edges exhibit apparent distortions that stretch and squish the facial features, resulting in poor video quality. In this work, we present a video warping algorithm to correct these distortions. Our key idea is to apply stereographic projection locally on the facial regions. We formulate a mesh warp problem using spatial-temporal energy minimization and minimize background deformation using a line-preservation term to maintain the straight edges in the background. To address temporal coherency, we constrain the temporal smoothness on the warping meshes and facial trajectories through the latent variables. For performance evaluation, we develop a wide-angle video dataset with a wide range of focal lengths. The user study shows that 83.9% of users prefer our algorithm over other alternatives based on perspective projection.