Qi Lu

Xian Ge, Yuling Pan, Yuhang Zhang et al.

The field of 360-degree omnidirectional understanding has been receiving increasing attention for advancing spatial intelligence. However, the lack of large-scale and diverse data remains a major limitation. In this work, we propose AirSim360, a simulation platform for omnidirectional data from aerial viewpoints, enabling wide-ranging scene sampling with drones. Specifically, AirSim360 focuses on three key aspects: a render-aligned data and labeling paradigm for pixel-level geometric, semantic, and entity-level understanding; an interactive pedestrian-aware system for modeling human behavior; and an automated trajectory generation paradigm to support navigation tasks. Furthermore, we collect more than 60K panoramic samples and conduct extensive experiments across various tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our simulator. Unlike existing simulators, our work is the first to systematically model the 4D real world under an omnidirectional setting. The entire platform, including the toolkit, plugins, and collected datasets, will be made publicly available at https://insta360-research-team.github.io/AirSim360-website.

Yikang Zhou, Tao Zhang, Dizhe Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require comprehensive visual inputs to achieve dense understanding of the physical world. While existing MLLMs demonstrate impressive world understanding capabilities through limited field-of-view (FOV) visual inputs (e.g., 70 degree), we take the first step toward dense understanding from omnidirectional panoramas. We first introduce an omnidirectional panoramas dataset featuring a comprehensive suite of reliability-scored annotations. Specifically, our dataset contains 160K panoramas with 5M dense entity-level captions, 1M unique referring expressions, and 100K entity-grounded panoramic scene descriptions. Compared to multi-view alternatives, panoramas can provide more complete, compact, and continuous scene representations through equirectangular projections (ERP). However, the use of ERP introduces two key challenges for MLLMs: i) spatial continuity along the circle of latitude, and ii) latitude-dependent variation in information density. We address these challenges through ERP-RoPE, a position encoding scheme specifically designed for panoramic ERP. In addition, we introduce Dense360-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on omnidirectional captioning and grounding, establishing a comprehensive framework for advancing dense visual-language understanding in panoramic settings.