# PanoContext-Former: Panoramic Total Scene Understanding with a Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09633/) (2020)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00222/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Incorporating Convolution Designs into Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11816/) (2021)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00678/) (2021)

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

- [PanSplat: 4K Panorama Synthesis with Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12096/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10444/) (2025)
- [Are Multimodal Large Language Models Ready for Omnidirectional Spatial Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11907/) (2025)
- [Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04565/) (2025)
- [PANORAMA: The Rise of Omnidirectional Vision in the Embodied AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12989/) (2025)
- [RAM: Recover Any 3D Human Motion in-the-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19929/) (2026)
- [Diorama: Unleashing Zero-shot Single-view 3D Indoor Scene Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19492/) (2024)
- [Omnidirectional Spatial Modeling from Correlated Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02164/) (2025)
- [Panoramic Multimodal Semantic Occupancy Prediction for Quadruped Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13108/) (2026)
- [R3DS: Reality-linked 3D Scenes for Panoramic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12301/) (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)
- [EAGOR: Embodied Reasoning in Omni-direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06165/) (2026)
- [PixCuboid: Room Layout Estimation from Multi-view Featuremetric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04659/) (2025)
- [Pano3DComposer: Feed-Forward Compositional 3D Scene Generation from Single Panoramic Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05908/) (2026)
- [TUN3D: Towards Real-World Scene Understanding from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21388/) (2025)
- [Panoramic Affordance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15558/) (2026)
- [Towards Accurate Single Panoramic 3D Detection: A Semantic Gaussian Centric Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14601/) (2026)
- [InSpace: Structure-Aware 3D Indoor Scene Generation from a Single 360deg Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03990/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoramic image enables deeper understanding and more holistic perception of 360^circ surrounding environment, which can naturally encode enriched scene context information compared to standard perspective image. Previous work has made lots of effort to solve the scene understanding task in a bottom-up form, thus each sub-task is processed separately and few correlations are explored in this procedure. In this paper, we propose a novel method using depth prior for holistic indoor scene understanding which recovers the objects' shapes, oriented bounding boxes and the 3D room layout simultaneously from a single panorama. In order to fully utilize the rich context information, we design a transformer-based context module to predict the representation and relationship among each component of the scene. In addition, we introduce a real-world dataset for scene understanding, including photo-realistic panoramas, high-fidelity depth images, accurately annotated room layouts, and oriented object bounding boxes and shapes. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous panoramic scene understanding methods in terms of both layout estimation and 3D object detection.