Visual question answering on 360° images

In this work, we introduce VQA 360°, a novel task of visual question answering on 360° images. Unlike a normal field-of-view image, a 360° image captures the entire visual content around the optical center of a camera, demanding more sophisticated spatial understanding and reasoning. To address this problem, we collect the first VQA 360° dataset, containing around 17, 000 real-world image-question-answer triplets for a variety of question types. We then study two different VQA models on VQA 360°, including one conventional model that takes an equirectangular image (with intrinsic distortion) as input and one dedicated model that first projects a 360° image onto cubemaps and subsequently aggregates the information from multiple spatial resolutions. We demonstrate that the cubemap-based model with multi-level fusion and attention diffusion performs favorably against other variants and the equirectangular-based models. Nevertheless, the gap between the humans' and machines' performance reveals the need for more advanced VQA 360° algorithms. We, therefore, expect our dataset and studies to serve as the benchmark for future development in this challenging task. Dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available online.¹.