Dual Enhancement in ODI Super-Resolution: Adapting Convolution and Upsampling to Projection Distortion

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) demand considerably higher resolution to ensure high quality across all viewports. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based single-image super-resolution (SISR) networks, however, are not effective for spherical ODIs. This is due to the uneven pixel density distribution and varying texture complexity in different regions that arise when projecting from a sphere to a plane. Additionally, the computational and memory costs associated with large-sized ODIs present a challenge for real-world application. To address these issues, we propose an efficient distortion-adaptive super-resolution network (ODA-SRN). Specifically, ODA-SRN employs a series of specially designed Distortion Attention Block Groups (DABG) as its backbone. Our Distortion Attention Blocks (DABs) utilize multi-segment parameterized convolution to generate dynamic filters, which compensate for distortion and texture fading during feature extraction. Moreover, we introduce an upsampling scheme that accounts for the dependence of pixel position and distortion degree to achieve pixel-level distortion offset. A comprehensive set of results demonstrates that our ODA-SRN significantly improves the super-resolution performance for ODIs, both quantitatively and qualitatively, when compared to other state-of-the-art methods.