3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has recently attracted great attention with real-time and photo-realistic renderings. This technique typically takes perspective images as input and optimizes a set of 3D elliptical Gaussians by splatting them onto the image planes, resulting in$2 D$Gaussians. However, applying 3D-GS to panoramic inputs presents challenges in effectively modeling the projection onto the spherical surface of 360° images using 2D Gaussians. In practical applications, input panoramas are often sparse, leading to unreliable initialization of 3D Gaussians and subsequent degradation of 3D-GS quality. In addition, due to the under-constrained geometry of texture-less planes (e.g., walls and floors), 3D-GS struggles to model these flat regions with elliptical Gaussians, resulting in significant floaters in novel views. To address these issues, we propose 360-GS, a novel layout-guided 360° Gaussian splatting for a limited set of panoramic inputs. Instead of splatting 3D Gaussians directly onto the spherical surface, 360-GS projects them onto the tangent plane of the unit sphere and then maps them to the spherical projections.

Object compositing offers significant promise for augmented reality (AR) and embodied intelligence applications. Existing approaches predominantly focus on single-image scenarios or intrinsic decomposition techniques, facing challenges with multi-view consistency, complex scenes, and diverse lighting conditions. Recent inverse rendering advancements, such as 3D Gaussian and diffusion-based methods, have enhanced consistency but are limited by scalability, heavy data requirements, or prolonged reconstruction time per scene. To broaden its applicability, we introduce MV-CoLight, a two-stage framework for illumination-consistent object compositing in both 2D images and 3D scenes. Our novel feed-forward architecture models lighting and shadows directly, avoiding the iterative biases of diffusion-based methods. We employ a Hilbert curve-based mapping to align 2D image inputs with 3D Gaussian scene representations seamlessly. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further introduce a large-scale 3D compositing dataset. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art harmonized results across standard benchmarks and our dataset, as well as casually captured real-world scenes demonstrate the framework's robustness and wide generalization.

Depth estimation is a fundamental task in many vision applications. With the popularity of omnidirectional cameras, it becomes a new trend to tackle this problem in the spherical space. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method for predicting dense depth values of a scene from a monocular omnidirectional image. An omnidirectional image has a full field-of-view, providing much more complete descriptions of the scene than perspective images. However, fully-convolutional networks that most current solutions rely on fail to capture rich global contexts from the panorama. To address this issue and also the distortion of equirectangular projection in the panorama, we propose Cubemap Vision Transformers (CViT), a new transformer-based architecture that can model long-range dependencies and extract distortion-free global features from the panorama. We show that cubemap vision transformers have a global receptive field at every stage and can provide globally coherent predictions for spherical signals. As a general architecture, it removes any restriction that has been imposed on the panorama in many other monocular panoramic depth estimation methods. To preserve important local features, we further design a convolution-based branch in our pipeline (dubbed GLPanoDepth) and fuse global features from cubemap vision transformers at multiple scales. This global-to-local strategy allows us to fully exploit useful global and local features in the panorama, achieving state-of-the-art performance in panoramic depth estimation.

Predicting panoramic indoor lighting from a single perspective image is a fundamental but highly ill-posed problem in computer vision and graphics. To achieve locale-aware and robust prediction, this problem can be decomposed into three sub-tasks: depth-based image warping, panorama inpainting and high-dynamic-range (HDR) reconstruction, among which the success of panorama inpainting plays a key role. Recent methods mostly rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to fill the missing contents in the warped panorama. However, they usually achieve suboptimal performance since the missing contents occupy a very large portion in the panoramic space while CNNs are plagued by limited receptive fields. The spatially-varying distortion in the spherical signals further increases the difficulty for conventional CNNs. To address these issues, we propose a local-to-global strategy for large-scale panorama inpainting. In our method, a depth-guided local inpainting is first applied on the warped panorama to fill small but dense holes. Then, a transformer-based network, dubbed PanoTransformer, is designed to hallucinate reasonable global structures in the large holes. To avoid distortion, we further employ cubemap projection in our design of PanoTransformer. The high-quality panorama recovered at any locale helps us to capture spatially-varying indoor illumination with physically-plausible global structures and fine details.