COP: A New Continuous Packing Layout for 360 VR Videos

We present a new projection format and packing layout for 360 VR videos using octahedron mapping. A spherical video is projected onto an octahedron, where the upper and lower hemispheres correspond to the upper and lower half of the octahedron, respectively. Four regular triangles in the half of the octahedron, are transformed into isosceles right-angled triangles and packed into a square by remaining adjacent edges. Two equal squares resulted respectively from the upper and lower half of the octahedron, are placed side by side and adjoined by a common edge. This generates a 2:1 aspect ratio rectangle. We demonstrate that our new projection format and layout have advantages in uniformity of pixel density, internal continuity and rectangle aspect ratio while encoding 360 VR videos.