# DIGITOUR: Automatic Digital Tours for Real-Estate Properties

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06680/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Metrics for Multi-Class Classification: an Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05756/) (2020)
- [PP-OCRv2: Bag of Tricks for Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03144/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A virtual or digital tour is a form of virtual reality technology which allows a user to experience a specific location remotely. Currently, these virtual tours are created by following a 2-step strategy. First, a photographer clicks a 360 degree equirectangular image; then, a team of annotators manually links these images for the "walkthrough" user experience. The major challenge in the mass adoption of virtual tours is the time and cost involved in manual annotation/linking of images. Therefore, this paper presents an end-to-end pipeline to automate the generation of 3D virtual tours using equirectangular images for real-estate properties. We propose a novel HSV-based coloring scheme for paper tags that need to be placed at different locations before clicking the equirectangular images using 360 degree cameras. These tags have two characteristics: i) they are numbered to help the photographer for placement of tags in sequence and; ii) bi-colored, which allows better learning of tag detection (using YOLOv5 architecture) in an image and digit recognition (using custom MobileNet architecture) tasks. Finally, we link/connect all the equirectangular images based on detected tags. We show the efficiency of the proposed pipeline on a real-world equirectangular image dataset collected from the Housing.com database.
