Facebook to use AI to correct your 360 degree photos

Earlier this week, Facebook announced the ability to upload 360-degree photos and set them as cover photos right in the app. The social network is now working on a way to use AI to automatically fix 360-degree photos.

If someone taking a 360-degree photo doesn’t hold the camera perfectly in line with the horizon, the resulting image can be tilted, which makes it harder to read and breaks the sense of immersion if the image is being viewed in virtual reality. So, the social network is now using deep neural networks to analyze 360-degree photos to fix the image orientation for a better viewing experience, especially in VR.

"Fixing this kind of rotation with editing software is straightforward for traditional photos, but the same types of tools are not widely available for 360 photos, and correcting rotation on a sphere is much less intuitive," Facebook's Matt Uyttendaele said.

In addition to the automatic rotation issue, Facebook also had to contend with the massive size of the 360-degree photos that were being uploaded to its service.