Undistorting Foreground Objects in Wide Angle Images

The use of wide angle lens on commodity cameras are becoming increasingly popular. However, this leads to image distortions due to the large difference in relative orientation of the different foreground objects with respect to the camera's image plane. More importantly, these distortions are different in different parts of the image since it depends entirely on the position and orientation of the foreground object with respect to the image plane. Such distortions often manifest themselves as objects in the foreground appearing fatter than they are supposed to be or parts thereof (e.g. hands or head of people) looking disproportionately larger than the rest of them. Though there are earlier works addressing other common distortions in cameras like radial distortions, little attention has been given to this problem. In this paper, we present an effective method to remove such distortions in foreground objects minimally distorting the background. This is achieved efficiently using a mesh-based pixel displacement technique assisted by a simple and intuitive user interface design.