Title: DA$^2$: Depth Anything in Any Direction
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Panoramas, Depth (Distance) Estimation

Abstract: Panorama has a full FoV (360$^\circ\times$180$^\circ$), offering a more complete visual description than perspective images.
Thanks to this characteristic, panoramic depth estimation is gaining increasing traction in 3D vision.
However, due to the scarcity of panoramic data, previous methods are often restricted to in-domain settings, leading to poor zero-shot generalization.
Furthermore, due to the spherical distortions inherent in panoramas, many approaches rely on perspective splitting (\textit{e.g.}, cubemaps),
which leads to suboptimal efficiency.
To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{DA}$$^{\textbf{2}}$: $\textbf{D}$epth $\textbf{A}$nything in $\textbf{A}$ny $\textbf{D}$irection, an accurate, zero-shot generalizable, and fully end-to-end panoramic depth estimator.
Specifically, for scaling up panoramic data, we introduce a data curation engine for generating high-quality panoramic depth data from perspective, and create $\sim$543K panoramic RGB-depth pairs, bringing the total to $\sim$607K.
To further mitigate the spherical distortions, we present SphereViT, which explicitly leverages spherical coordinates to enforce the spherical geometric consistency in panoramic image features, yielding improved performance.
A comprehensive benchmark on multiple datasets clearly demonstrates DA$^{2}$'s SoTA performance, with an average 38\% improvement on AbsRel over the strongest zero-shot baseline.
Surprisingly, DA$^{2}$ even outperforms prior in-domain methods, highlighting its superior zero-shot generalization.
Moreover, as an end-to-end solution, DA$^{2}$ exhibits much higher efficiency over fusion-based approaches.
Both the code and the curated panoramic data will be released.

TL;DR: DA$^{2}$ is a zero-shot, end-to-end panoramic depth estimator trained on large-scale curated data with a sphere-aware ViT to reduce distortions. It runs efficiently and surpasses prior methods by a large margin both qualitatively and quantitatively.