# 360U-Former: HDR Illumination Estimation with Panoramic Adapted Vision Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13566 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13566/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00222/) (2019)
- [The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00734/) (2018)
- [Learning to Predict Indoor Illumination from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00090/) (2017)
- [Deep Parametric Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08812/) (2019)
- [Fast Spatially-Varying Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03799/) (2019)
- [Deep Sky Modeling for Single Image Outdoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03897/) (2019)
- [DeepLight: Learning Illumination for Unconstrained Mobile Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01175/) (2019)
- [Lighthouse: Predicting Lighting Volumes for Spatially-Coherent Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08367/) (2020)
- [EMLight: Lighting Estimation via Spherical Distribution Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11116/) (2020)
- [HDR Environment Map Estimation for Real-Time Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10687/) (2020)
- [Diverse Plausible 360-Degree Image Outpainting for Efficient 3DCG Background Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14668/) (2022)
- [Customizing 360-Degree Panoramas through Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18840/) (2023)
- [All-Weather Deep Outdoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04909/) (2019)
- [Learning High Dynamic Range from Outdoor Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10200/) (2017)
- [Guided Co-Modulated GAN for 360deg Field of View Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07286/) (2022)
- [EverLight: Indoor-Outdoor Editable HDR Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13207/) (2023)
- [RFormer: Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network for Real Fundus Image Restoration on A New Clinical Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00466/) (2022)
- [PanoSwin: a Pano-style Swin Transformer for Panorama Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14726/) (2023)
- [360 Depth Estimation in the Wild -- The Depth360 Dataset and the SegFuse Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08010/) (2022)
- [Panoramic Vision Transformer for Saliency Detection in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08956/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12372/) (2023)
- [Editable Indoor Lighting Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03928/) (2022)
- [Generalised Image Outpainting with U-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11403/) (2022)
- [Deep Lighting Environment Map Estimation from Spherical Panoramas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08000/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [HDR Environment Map Estimation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21261/) (2025)
- [Towards Physically-Based Sky-Modeling For Image Based Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15632/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Layer System for Ultra-High-Resolution Static 360-Degree Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05570/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent illumination estimation methods have focused on enhancing the resolution and improving the quality and diversity of the generated textures. However, few have explored tailoring the neural network architecture to the Equirectangular Panorama (ERP) format utilised in image-based lighting. Consequently, high dynamic range images (HDRI) results usually exhibit a seam at the side borders and textures or objects that are warped at the poles. To address this shortcoming we propose a novel architecture, 360U-Former, based on a U-Net style Vision-Transformer which leverages the work of PanoSWIN, an adapted shifted window attention tailored to the ERP format. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first purely Vision-Transformer model used in the field of illumination estimation. We train 360U-Former as a GAN to generate HDRI from a limited field of view low dynamic range image (LDRI). We evaluate our method using current illumination estimation evaluation protocols and datasets, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing and state-of-the-art methods without the artefacts typically associated with the use of the ERP format.