# SphereDepth: Panorama Depth Estimation from Spherical Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.13714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)
- [High Quality Monocular Depth Estimation via Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11941/) (2018)
- [HorizonNet: Learning Room Layout with 1D Representation and Pano Stretch Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03861/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Geometric Consistency Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08103/) (2019)
- [HoHoNet: 360 Indoor Holistic Understanding with Latent Horizontal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11498/) (2020)
- [Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14021/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MeshNet: Mesh Neural Network for 3D Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11424/) (2018)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [Towards Better Generalization: Joint Depth-Pose Learning without PoseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01314/) (2020)
- [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)
- [MeshCNN: A Network with an Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05910/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [DA2: Depth Anything in Any Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26618/) (2025)
- [SphereUFormer: A U-Shaped Transformer for Spherical 360 Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06968/) (2024)
- [Estimating Depth of Monocular Panoramic Image with Teacher-Student Model Fusing Equirectangular and Spherical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16858/) (2024)
- [SphereFusion: Efficient Panorama Depth Estimation via Gated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05859/) (2025)
- [From Perspective to Fisheye Depth Estimation and Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27860/) (2026)
- [Decoupling Spherical Reasoning from Dense Prediction for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38856/) (2026)
- [SO(3)-RoPE for Spherical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06229/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The panorama image can simultaneously demonstrate complete information of the surrounding environment and has many advantages in virtual tourism, games, robotics, etc. However, the progress of panorama depth estimation cannot completely solve the problems of distortion and discontinuity caused by the commonly used projection methods. This paper proposes SphereDepth, a novel panorama depth estimation method that predicts the depth directly on the spherical mesh without projection preprocessing. The core idea is to establish the relationship between the panorama image and the spherical mesh and then use a deep neural network to extract features on the spherical domain to predict depth. To address the efficiency challenges brought by the high-resolution panorama data, we introduce two hyper-parameters for the proposed spherical mesh processing framework to balance the inference speed and accuracy. Validated on three public panorama datasets, SphereDepth achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art methods of panorama depth estimation. Benefiting from the spherical domain setting, SphereDepth can generate a high-quality point cloud and significantly alleviate the issues of distortion and discontinuity.