MTPano: Multi-Task Panoramic Scene Understanding via Label-Free Integration of Dense Prediction Priors

TL;DR

MTPano is a multi-task panoramic scene understanding model that uses a label-free training pipeline with pseudo-labels, disentangled feature streams, and geometry-aware modules to improve performance across diverse tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel label-free training pipeline and a dual-branch architecture that effectively disentangles and integrates features for multi-task panoramic scene understanding.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Effectively leverages perspective dense priors for panoramic tasks.

Demonstrates competitive performance against task-specific models.

Abstract

Comprehensive panoramic scene understanding is critical for immersive applications, yet it remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-resolution, multi-task annotations. While perspective foundation models have achieved success through data scaling, directly adapting them to the panoramic domain often fails due to severe geometric distortions and coordinate system discrepancies. Furthermore, the underlying relations between diverse dense prediction tasks in spherical spaces are underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose MTPano, a robust multi-task panoramic foundation model established by a label-free training pipeline. First, to circumvent data scarcity, we leverage powerful perspective dense priors. We project panoramic images into perspective patches to generate accurate, domain-gap-free pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf foundation models, which are then re-projected to serve as patch-wise supervision. Second, to tackle the interference between task types, we categorize tasks into rotation-invariant (e.g., depth, segmentation) and rotation-variant (e.g., surface normals) groups. We introduce the Panoramic Dual BridgeNet, which disentangles these feature streams via geometry-aware modulation layers that inject absolute position and ray direction priors. To handle the distortion from equirectangular projections (ERP), we incorporate ERP token mixers followed by a dual-branch BridgeNet for interactions with gradient truncation, facilitating beneficial cross-task information sharing while blocking conflicting gradients from incompatible task attributes. Additionally, we introduce auxiliary tasks to fertilize the cross-task learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTPano achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and delivers competitive results against task-specific panoramic specialist foundation models.