What is the equirectangular image format?

Spherical cameras store the images in two formats:

• Cubic format.
• Equirectangular format.

The cubic format consists of 6 undistorted, perspective images: Up, down, left, right, forward and backward, whereas the equirectangular format is one single stitched image of 360° horizontally and 180° vertically. The cubic format suffers from less distortion than the equirectangular, but the equirectangular is more popular and more widely supported. The equirectangular format is well defined and standardized for all manufacturers.

PiIX4Dmapper supports the equirectangular format of spherical cameras for processing. Images of this format are automatically detected as spherical images.