# SphereUFormer: A U-Shaped Transformer for Spherical 360 Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (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)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Geom-GCN: Geometric Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05287/) (2020)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00222/) (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)
- [PanoFormer: Panorama Transformer for Indoor 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09283/) (2022)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Cube Padding for Weakly-Supervised Saliency Prediction in 360deg Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01320/) (2018)
- [DeepSphere: a graph-based spherical CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15000/) (2020)
- [OmniFusion: 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Geometry-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00838/) (2022)
- [Subdivision-Based Mesh Convolution Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02285/) (2021)
- [360MonoDepth: High-Resolution 360deg Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15669/) (2021)
- [Orientation-aware Semantic Segmentation on Icosahedron Spheres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12849/) (2019)
- [EGformer: Equirectangular Geometry-biased Transformer for 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07803/) (2023)
- [SpherePHD: Applying CNNs on a Spherical PolyHeDron Representation of 360 degree Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08196/) (2018)
- [Pano3D: A Holistic Benchmark and a Solid Baseline for 360o Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02749/) (2021)
- [HRDFuse: Monocular 360degDepth Estimation by Collaboratively Learning Holistic-with-Regional Depth Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11616/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Depth Any Panoramas: A Foundation Model for Panoramic Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16913/) (2025)
- [Attention on the Sphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11157/) (2025)
- [OmniTrack++: Omnidirectional Multi-Object Tracking by Learning Large-FoV Trajectory Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00510/) (2025)
- [EAGOR: Embodied Reasoning in Omni-direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06165/) (2026)
- [SO3UFormer: Learning Intrinsic Spherical Features for Rotation-Robust Panoramic Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22867/) (2026)
- [MARA: Continuous SE(3)-Equivariant Attention for Molecular Force Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02671/) (2026)
- [Panoramic Scene Understanding: A Survey from Distortion-Aware Engineering to Sphere-Native Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27745/) (2026)
- [EAGLE-360: Embodied Active Global-to-Local Exploration in 360^circ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02479/) (2026)
- [AdapToPASS: Ambiguity-aware Adaptive Spherical Transformer for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29081/) (2026)
- [Neural Operators for Biomedical Spherical Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03561/) (2026)
- [SphMind: Towards Robust, Training-Free VLM-based Spatial Reasoning with a 360 Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33462/) (2026)
- [SCCM: Spherically Consistent Coarse Matching for ERP Dense Feature Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36545/) (2026)
- [SO(3)-RoPE for Spherical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06229/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel method for omnidirectional 360degree perception. Most common previous methods relied on equirectangular projection. This representation is easily applicable to 2D operation layers but introduces distortions into the image. Other methods attempted to remove the distortions by maintaining a sphere representation but relied on complicated convolution kernels that failed to show competitive results. In this work, we introduce a transformer-based architecture that, by incorporating a novel ``Spherical Local Self-Attention'' and other spherically-oriented modules, successfully operates in the spherical domain and outperforms the state-of-the-art in 360degree perception benchmarks for depth estimation and semantic segmentation.