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Omnidirectional (or 360-degree) images and videos are emergent signals in many areas such as robotics and virtual/augmented reality. In particular, for virtual reality, they allow an immersive experience in which the user is provided with a 360-degree field of view and can navigate throughout a scene, e.g., through the use of Head Mounted Displays. Since it represents the full 360-degree field of view from one point of the scene, omnidirectional content is naturally represented as spherical visual signals. Current approaches for capturing, processing, delivering, and displaying 360-degree content, however, present many open technical challenges and introduce several types of distortions in these visual signals. Some of the distortions are specific to the nature of 360-degree images, and often different from those encountered in the classical image communication framework. This paper provides a first comprehensive review of the most common visual distortions that alter 360-degree signals undergoing state of the art processing in common applications. While their impact on viewers' visual perception and on the immersive experience at large is still unknown ---thus, it stays an open research topic--- this review serves the purpose of identifying the main causes of visual distortions in the end-to-end 360-degree content distribution pipeline. It is essential as a basis for benchmarking different processing techniques, allowing the effective design of new algorithms and applications. It is also necessary to the deployment of proper psychovisual studies to characterise the human perception of these new images in interactive and immersive applications., First appeared online at: December 30, 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330008773_Visual_Distortions_in_360-degree_Videos

Unlike traditional planar 2D visual content, immersive 360-degree images and videos undergo particular processing steps and are intended to be consumed via head-mounted displays (HMDs). To get a deeper understanding on the perception of 360-degree visual distortions when consumed through HMDs, we perform an exploratory task-based subjective study in which we have asked subjects to define the first noticeable difference and break-in-presence points when incrementally adding specific compression artifacts. The results of our study: give insights on the range of allowed visual distortions for 360-degree content; show that the added visual distortions are more tolerable in mono than in stereoscopic 3D; and identify issues with current 360-degree objective quality metrics.

This paper presents an extension of block-based motion estimation for omnidirectional videos, based on a camera and translational object motion model that accounts for the spherical geometry of the imaging system. We use this model to design a new algorithm to perform block matching in sequences of panoramic frames that are the result of the equirectangular projection. Experimental results demonstrate that significant gains can be achieved with respect to the classical exhaustive block matching algorithm (EBMA) in terms of accuracy of motion prediction. In particular, average quality improvements up to approximately 6dB in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), 0.043 in terms of Structural SIMilarity index (SSIM), and 2dB in terms of spherical PSNR, can be achieved on the predicted frames.