LAU-Net: Latitude Adaptive Upscaling Network for Omnidirectional Image Super-resolution

The omnidirectional images (ODIs) are usually at low-resolution, due to the constraints of collection, storage and transmission. The traditional two-dimensional (2D) image super-resolution methods are not effective for spherical ODIs, because ODIs tend to have non-uniformly distributed pixel density and varying texture complexity across latitudes. In this work, we propose a novel latitude adaptive upscaling network (LAU-Net) for ODI super-resolution, which allows pixels at different latitudes to adopt distinct upscaling factors. Specifically, we introduce a Laplacian multi-level separation architecture to split an ODI into different latitude bands, and hierarchically upscale them with different factors. In addition, we propose a deep reinforcement learning scheme with a latitude adaptive reward, in order to automatically select optimal upscaling factors for different latitude bands. To the best of our knowledge, LAU-Net is the first attempt to consider the latitude difference for ODI super-resolution. Extensive results demonstrate that our LAU-Net significantly advances the super-resolution performance for ODIs.