Panoramic Scene Understanding: A Survey from Distortion-Aware Engineering to Sphere-Native Modeling
Panoramic images capture the full visual sphere in a frame, offering context unavailable to conventional cameras. Yet this completeness has an unavoidable geometric cost: the 2-sphere cannot be faithfully mapped to the plane, and every projection introduces distortions that challenge standard vision architectures. This survey traces panoramic scene understanding from projection-based adaptation and distortion-aware engineering to sphere-native modeling, reflecting increasing commitment to spherical geometry. Foundation models form a fourth family, geometry-aware tokenization, which adapts the input interface while reusing perspective-pretrained weights. We review these approaches across f...
| Authors | Qinfeng Zhu, Lei Fan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 26 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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