A Great Circle Arc Detector in Equirectangular Images

We propose a great circle arc detector in a scene represented by an equirectangular image, i.e. a spherical image of the 360 longitude and 180 latitude field of view. Since the straight lines appears curved in equirectangular images, the standard line detection algorithm cannot be used directly in this context. We extend the LSD method (Gioi et al., 2010) to deal with the equirectangular images instead of planar images. So the proposed method has most of the advantages of the LSD method, which gives accurate results with a controlled number of false detections but requires no parameter tuning. This algorithm is tested and compared to other algorithm on a wide set of images.