# GLPanoDepth: Global-to-Local Panoramic Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10130/) (2018)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Monocular Depth Estimation and Visual Odometry with Deep Feature Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03893/) (2018)
- [CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03489/) (2017)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Fields for Depth Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6387/) (2014)
- [HoHoNet: 360 Indoor Holistic Understanding with Latent Horizontal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11498/) (2020)
- [OmniDepth: Dense Depth Estimation for Indoors Spherical Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09620/) (2018)
- [LayoutNet: Reconstructing the 3D Room Layout from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08999/) (2018)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Omnidirectional Vision: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10468/) (2022)
- [Depth Anywhere: Enhancing 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Perspective Distillation and Unlabeled Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12849/) (2024)
- [HRDFuse: Monocular 360degDepth Estimation by Collaboratively Learning Holistic-with-Regional Depth Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11616/) (2023)
- [Depth Any Panoramas: A Foundation Model for Panoramic Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16913/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Masked Pre-Training for Monocular Panoramic Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09855/) (2022)
- [Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04565/) (2025)
- [SGFormer: Spherical Geometry Transformer for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14979/) (2024)
- [PanoNormal: Monocular Indoor 360deg Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18745/) (2024)
- [Estimating Depth of Monocular Panoramic Image with Teacher-Student Model Fusing Equirectangular and Spherical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16858/) (2024)
- [OmniTrack++: Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking by Learning Large-FoV Trajectory Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00510/) (2025)
- [Multi-task Geometric Estimation of Depth and Surface Normal from Monocular 360deg Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01749/) (2024)
- [Panoramic Scene Understanding: A Survey from Distortion-Aware Engineering to Sphere-Native Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27745/) (2026)
- [PAGCNet: A Pose-Aware and Geometry Constrained Framework for Panoramic Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07817/) (2025)
- [Cross360: 360deg Monocular Depth Estimation via Cross Projections Across Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a learning-based method for predicting dense depth values of a scene from a monocular omnidirectional image. An omnidirectional image has a full field-of-view, providing much more complete descriptions of the scene than perspective images. However, fully-convolutional networks that most current solutions rely on fail to capture rich global contexts from the panorama. To address this issue and also the distortion of equirectangular projection in the panorama, we propose Cubemap Vision Transformers (CViT), a new transformer-based architecture that can model long-range dependencies and extract distortion-free global features from the panorama. We show that cubemap vision transformers have a global receptive field at every stage and can provide globally coherent predictions for spherical signals. To preserve important local features, we further design a convolution-based branch in our pipeline (dubbed GLPanoDepth) and fuse global features from cubemap vision transformers at multiple scales. This global-to-local strategy allows us to fully exploit useful global and local features in the panorama, achieving state-of-the-art performance in panoramic depth estimation.