PANORAMIC IMAGE COMPRESSION METHOD AND APPARATUS

Embodiments of the present application provide a panoramic image compression method and device. The method comprises: obtaining a first spherical model formed by a first panoramic image to be compressed; generating a second spherical model in the first spherical model according to a main view image of an user; establishing a first mapping relationship between plane 2D rectangular coordinates in a second panoramic image and plane 2D rectangular coordinates in the first panoramic image; and sampling, from the first panoramic image, pixels corresponding to plane 2D rectangular coordinates in the second panoramic image according to the first mapping relationship to constitute the second panoramic image containing the pixels, so as to realize the compression of the first panoramic image. The method realizes the non-uniform compression of a first panoramic image, specifically, for images at a main viewing angle of users, a higher sampling rate is set so as to guarantee the definitions of images at a main viewing angle of users, and for the other images, a lower sampling rate is utilized so as to compress the first panoramic image into a smaller second panoramic image and facilitate the storage, transmission and decoding of the panoramic image.