# PanoFormer: Panorama Transformer for Indoor 360 Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09283/

## Key facts

- Cited by 95 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (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)
- [Learning SO(3) Equivariant Representations with Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06721/) (2017)
- [Incorporating Convolution Designs into Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11816/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [HorizonNet: Learning Room Layout with 1D Representation and Pano Stretch Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03861/) (2019)
- [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)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [RigNet: Repetitive Image Guided Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13802/) (2021)
- [Spherical CNNs on Unstructured Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02039/) (2019)
- [Tangent Images for Mitigating Spherical Distortion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09390/) (2019)
- [Cube Padding for Weakly-Supervised Saliency Prediction in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01320/) (2018)
- [Kernel Transformer Networks for Compact Spherical Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03115/) (2018)
- [SpherePHD: Applying CNNs on a Spherical PolyHeDron Representation of 360 degree Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08196/) (2018)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09402/) (2019)
- [Learning Spherical Convolution for Fast Features from 360deg Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00919/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 95)

- [Ctrl-Room: Controllable Text-to-3D Room Meshes Generation with Layout Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03602/) (2023)
- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [EGformer: Equirectangular Geometry-biased Transformer for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07803/) (2023)
- [Depth Any Camera: Zero-Shot Metric Depth Estimation from Any Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02464/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Elite360D: Towards Efficient 360 Depth Estimation via Semantic- and Distance-Aware Bi-Projection Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16376/) (2024)
- [SGAT4PASS: Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03403/) (2023)
- [DA2: Depth Anything in Any Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26618/) (2025)
- [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)
- [PanDA: Towards Panoramic Depth Anything with Unlabeled Panoramas and Mobius Spatial Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13378/) (2024)
- [PanoSwin: a Pano-style Swin Transformer for Panorama Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14726/) (2023)
- [PanoContext-Former: Panoramic Total Scene Understanding with a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12497/) (2023)
- [Single Frame Semantic Segmentation Using Multi-Modal Spherical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09369/) (2023)
- [Open Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02685/) (2024)
- [Disentangling Orthogonal Planes for Indoor Panoramic Room Layout Estimation with Cross-Scale Distortion Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00971/) (2023)
- [Minimalist and High-Quality Panoramic Imaging with PSF-aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12992/) (2023)
- [SphereUFormer: A U-Shaped Transformer for Spherical 360 Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06968/) (2024)
- [Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04565/) (2025)
- [PanoVGGT: Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction from Panoramic Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17571/) (2026)
- [Cylin-Painting: Seamless 360textdegree Panoramic Image Outpainting and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08563/) (2022)
- [Complementary Bi-directional Feature Compression for Indoor 360deg Semantic Segmentation with Self-distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02437/) (2022)
- [PANORAMA: The Rise of Omnidirectional Vision in the Embodied AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12989/) (2025)
- [High-Resolution Depth Estimation for 360-degree Panoramas through Perspective and Panoramic Depth Images Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10414/) (2022)
- [RigNet++: Semantic Assisted Repetitive Image Guided Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00655/) (2023)
- [One2Scene: Geometric Consistent Explorable 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19766/) (2026)
- [SGFormer: Spherical Geometry Transformer for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14979/) (2024)
- [PanoSplatt3R: Leveraging Perspective Pretraining for Generalized Unposed Wide-Baseline Panorama Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21960/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing panoramic depth estimation methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focus on removing panoramic distortions, failing to perceive panoramic structures efficiently due to the fixed receptive field in CNNs. This paper proposes the panorama transformer (named PanoFormer) to estimate the depth in panorama images, with tangent patches from spherical domain, learnable token flows, and panorama specific metrics. In particular, we divide patches on the spherical tangent domain into tokens to reduce the negative effect of panoramic distortions. Since the geometric structures are essential for depth estimation, a self-attention module is redesigned with an additional learnable token flow. In addition, considering the characteristic of the spherical domain, we present two panorama-specific metrics to comprehensively evaluate the panoramic depth estimation models' performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, the proposed method can be effectively extended to solve semantic panorama segmentation, a similar pixel2pixel task. Code will be available.