Automatic 3D modeling of indoor structures from panoramic imagery

Creating high-level structured 3D models of real-world indoor scenes from captured data and exploiting them are fundamental tasks with important applications in many fields. In this context, 360 capture and processing is very appealing, since panoramic imaging provides the quickest and most complete per-image coverage and is supported by a wide variety of professional and consumer capture devices. Research on inferring 3D indoor models from 360 images has been thriving in recent years, and has led to a variety of very effective solutions. Given the complexity and variability of interior environments, and the need to cope with noisy and incomplete captured data, many open research problems still remain. In this tutorial, we provide an up-to-date integrative view of the field. After introducing a characterization of input sources, we define the structure of output models, the priors exploited to bridge the gap between imperfect input and desired output, and the main characteristics of geometry reasoning and data-driven approaches. We then identify and discuss the main subproblems in structured reconstruction, and review and analyze state-of-the-art solutions for floor plan segmentation, bounding surfaces reconstruction, object detection and reconstruction, integrated model computation, and visual representation generation. We finally point out relevant research issues and analyze research trends.