Hardware-Assisted Rendering of Cylindrical Panoramas

Cylindrical panorama is being used in many applications. Cylindrical panoramic viewers render the panorama from the center of the cylinder by projecting the cylindrical map onto a planar screen. This process involves nonlinear image warping, so many panoramic viewers are implemented in software. Hardware acceleration may be used if the panorama is resampled onto the polygonal models. This paper presents an algorithm to render cylindrical panorama with hardware acceleration while using the input panorama as is. The rendering equation of cylindrical panorama is decomposed into linear approximation and nonlinear residuals. Nonlinear parts are encoded as bump maps to perturb the texture coordinates on a per-pixel basis. This process can be performed by environment-mapped bump mapping (EMBM) hardware.