Warping Peirce Quincuncial Panoramas

Abstract

The Peirce quincuncial projection is a mapping of the surface of a sphere to the interior of a square. It is a conformal map except for four points on the equator. These points of non-conformality cause significant artifacts in photographic applications. In this paper, we propose an algorithm and user-interface to mitigate these artifacts. Moreover, in order to facilitate an interactive user-interface, we present a fast algorithm for calculating the Peirce quincuncial projection of spherical imagery. We then promote the Peirce quincuncial projection as a viable alternative to the more popular stereographic projection in some scenarios.