360° 3D Photos from a Single 360° Input Image

360° images are a popular medium for bringing photography into virtual reality. While users can look in any direction by rotating their heads, 360° images ultimately look flat. That is because they lack depth information and thus cannot create motion parallax when translating the head. To achieve a fully immersive VR experience from a single 360° image, we introduce a novel method to upgrade 360° images to free-viewpoint renderings with 6 degrees of freedom. Alternative approaches reconstruct textured 3D geometry, which is fast to render but suffers from visible reconstruction artifacts, or use neural radiance fields that produce high-quality novel views but too slowly for VR applications. Our 360°3D photos build on 3D Gaussian splatting as the underlying scene representation to simultaneously achieve high visual quality and real-time rendering speed. To fill plausible content in previously unseen regions, we introduce a novel combination of latent diffusion inpainting and monocular depth estimation with Poisson-based blending. Our results demonstrate state-of-the-art visual and depth quality at rendering rates of 105 FPS per megapixel on a commodity GPU.

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Publication Details

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Published
2025-03-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2025.3549538
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Advanced Vision and Imaging
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
1.28
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article

360° 3D Photos from a Single 360° Input Image

Manuel Rey-Area, Christian Richardt
1 citations
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Advanced Vision and Imaging
1.28
article

360° 3D Photos from a Single 360° Input Image

Manuel Rey-Area, Christian Richardt
article en
1 citations

Abstract

360° images are a popular medium for bringing photography into virtual reality. While users can look in any direction by rotating their heads, 360° images ultimately look flat. That is because they lack depth information and thus cannot create motion parallax when translating the head. To achieve a fully immersive VR experience from a single 360° image, we introduce a novel method to upgrade 360° images to free-viewpoint renderings with 6 degrees of freedom. Alternative approaches reconstruct textured 3D geometry, which is fast to render but suffers from visible reconstruction artifacts, or use neural radiance fields that produce high-quality novel views but too slowly for VR applications. Our 360°3D photos build on 3D Gaussian splatting as the underlying scene representation to simultaneously achieve high visual quality and real-time rendering speed. To fill plausible content in previously unseen regions, we introduce a novel combination of latent diffusion inpainting and monocular depth estimation with Poisson-based blending. Our results demonstrate state-of-the-art visual and depth quality at rendering rates of 105 FPS per megapixel on a commodity GPU.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer GraphicsVol. 31(5)
META Health (US), University of Bath (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 22%
Advanced Vision and Imaging
1.28
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360° 3D Photos from a Single 360° Input Image — Manuel Rey-Area, Christian Richardt · IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS