# Annular Computational Imaging: Capture Clear Panoramic Images through Simple Lens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [Deep Stacked Hierarchical Multi-patch Network for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03468/) (2019)
- [Burst Denoising with Kernel Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02327/) (2017)
- [Learning a Convolutional Neural Network for Non-uniform Motion Blur Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00593/) (2015)
- [Replacing Mobile Camera ISP with a Single Deep Learning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05509/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Filter Adaptive Network for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12257/) (2019)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [Intriguing Findings of Frequency Selection for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11745/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Adaptive Network for Single Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10291/) (2020)
- [Deep Optics for Single-shot High-dynamic-range Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00620/) (2019)
- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [PanoFlow: Learning 360deg Optical Flow for Surrounding Temporal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13388/) (2022)
- [Universal and Flexible Optical Aberration Correction Using Deep-Prior Based Deconvolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03078/) (2021)
- [OmniSLAM: Omnidirectional Localization and Dense Mapping for Wide-baseline Multi-camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08056/) (2020)
- [Miniscope3D: optimized single-shot miniature 3D fluorescence microscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05382/) (2020)
- [ROVO: Robust Omnidirectional Visual Odometry for Wide-baseline Wide-FOV Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11154/) (2019)
- [EDPN: Enhanced Deep Pyramid Network for Blurry Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04872/) (2021)
- [Aerial-PASS: Panoramic Annular Scene Segmentation in Drone Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07209/) (2021)
- [Deep-learning-augmented Computational Miniature Mesoscope](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00123/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [Open Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02685/) (2024)
- [Minimalist and High-Quality Panoramic Imaging with PSF-aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12992/) (2023)
- [Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04565/) (2025)
- [Computational Imaging for Machine Perception: Transferring Semantic Segmentation beyond Aberrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11257/) (2022)
- [Exploring Quasi-Global Solutions to Compound Lens Based Computational Imaging Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19201/) (2024)
- [Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02182/) (2024)
- [LF-PGVIO: A Visual-Inertial-Odometry Framework for Large Field-of-View Cameras using Points and Geodesic Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06663/) (2023)
- [Towards Universal Computational Aberration Correction in Photographic Cameras: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12083/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) composed of few lenses has great potential in panoramic surrounding sensing tasks for mobile and wearable devices because of its tiny size and large Field of View (FoV). However, the image quality of tiny-volume PAL confines to optical limit due to the lack of lenses for aberration correction. In this paper, we propose an Annular Computational Imaging (ACI) framework to break the optical limit of light-weight PAL design. To facilitate learning-based image restoration, we introduce a wave-based simulation pipeline for panoramic imaging and tackle the synthetic-to-real gap through multiple data distributions. The proposed pipeline can be easily adapted to any PAL with design parameters and is suitable for loose-tolerance designs. Furthermore, we design the Physics Informed Image Restoration Network (PI2RNet) considering the physical priors of panoramic imaging and single-pass physics-informed engine. At the dataset level, we create the DIVPano dataset and the extensive experiments on it illustrate that our proposed network sets the new state of the art in the panoramic image restoration under spatially-variant degradation. In addition, the evaluation of the proposed ACI on a simple PAL with only 3 spherical lenses reveals the delicate balance between high-quality panoramic imaging and compact design. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore Computational Imaging (CI) in PAL. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/zju-jiangqi/ACI-PI2RNet.