# PanelNet: Understanding 360 Indoor Environment via Panel Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Estimating Depth from Monocular Images as Classification Using Deep Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02305/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [DuLa-Net: A Dual-Projection Network for Estimating Room Layouts from a Single RGB Panorama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11977/) (2018)
- [OmniFusion: 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Geometry-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00838/) (2022)
- [DepthTransfer: Depth Extraction from Video Using Non-parametric Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00987/) (2019)
- [360MonoDepth: High-Resolution 360deg Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15669/) (2021)
- [LED2-Net: Monocular 360 Layout Estimation via Differentiable Depth Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00568/) (2021)
- [SpherePHD: Applying CNNs on a Spherical PolyHeDron Representation of 360 degree Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08196/) (2018)
- [ACDNet: Adaptively Combined Dilated Convolution for Monocular Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14440/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Elite360D: Towards Efficient 360 Depth Estimation via Semantic- and Distance-Aware Bi-Projection Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16376/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [PanDA: Towards Panoramic Depth Anything with Unlabeled Panoramas and Mobius Spatial Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13378/) (2024)
- [PanoContext-Former: Panoramic Total Scene Understanding with a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12497/) (2023)
- [Open Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02685/) (2024)
- [Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04565/) (2025)
- [Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16469/) (2024)
- [PanoSplatt3R: Leveraging Perspective Pretraining for Generalized Unposed Wide-Baseline Panorama Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21960/) (2025)
- [Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02182/) (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)
- [Elite360M: Efficient 360 Multi-task Learning via Bi-projection Fusion and Cross-task Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09336/) (2024)
- [Panoramic Out-of-Distribution Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03539/) (2025)
- [360-Degree Full-view Image Segmentation by Spherical Convolution compatible with Large-scale Planar Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09216/) (2025)
- [Denoise and Align: Towards Source-Free UDA for Robust Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25131/) (2026)
- [Panoramic Scene Understanding: A Survey from Distortion-Aware Engineering to Sphere-Native Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27745/) (2026)
- [CUBE360: Learning Cubic Field Representation for Monocular 360 Depth Estimation for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05735/) (2024)
- [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)

Indoor 360 panoramas have two essential properties. (1) The panoramas are continuous and seamless in the horizontal direction. (2) Gravity plays an important role in indoor environment design. By leveraging these properties, we present PanelNet, a framework that understands indoor environments using a novel panel representation of 360 images. We represent an equirectangular projection (ERP) as consecutive vertical panels with corresponding 3D panel geometry. To reduce the negative impact of panoramic distortion, we incorporate a panel geometry embedding network that encodes both the local and global geometric features of a panel. To capture the geometric context in room design, we introduce Local2Global Transformer, which aggregates local information within a panel and panel-wise global context. It greatly improves the model performance with low training overhead. Our method outperforms existing methods on indoor 360 depth estimation and shows competitive results against state-of-the-art approaches on the task of indoor layout estimation and semantic segmentation.