  This paper proposes a novel approach to generating omni-directional images
from a single snapshot picture. The previous method has relied on the
generative adversarial networks based on convolutional neural networks (CNN).
Although this method has successfully generated omni-directional images, CNN
has two drawbacks for this task. First, since a convolutional layer only
processes a local area, it is difficult to propagate the information of an
input snapshot picture embedded in the center of the omni-directional image to
the edges of the image. Thus, the omni-directional images created by the
CNN-based generator tend to have less diversity at the edges of the generated
images, creating similar scene images. Second, the CNN-based model requires
large video memory in graphics processing units due to the nature of the deep
structure in CNN since shallow-layer networks only receives signals from a
limited range of the receptive field. To solve these problems, MLPMixer-based
method was proposed in this paper. The MLPMixer has been proposed as an
alternative to the self-attention in the transformer, which captures long-range
dependencies and contextual information. This enables to propagate information
efficiently in the omni-directional image generation task. As a result,
competitive performance has been achieved with reduced memory consumption and
computational cost, in addition to increasing diversity of the generated
omni-directional images.
