ZInD-Tell: Towards Translating Indoor Panoramas into Descriptions

This paper focuses on bridging the gap between natural language descriptions, 360° panoramas, room shapes, and layouts/floorplans of indoor spaces. To enable new multimodal (image, geometry, language) research directions in indoor environment understanding, we propose a novel extension to the Zillow Indoor Dataset (ZInD) which we call ZInD-Tell¹. We first introduce an effective technique for extracting geometric information from ZInD’s raw structural data, which facilitates the generation of accurate ground truth descriptions using GPT-4. A human-in-the-loop approach is then employed to ensure the quality of these descriptions. To demonstrate the vast potential of our dataset, we introduce the ZInD-Tell benchmark, focusing on two exemplary tasks: language-based home retrieval and indoor description generation. Furthermore, we propose an end-to-end, zero-shot baseline model, ZInD-Agent, designed to process an unordered set of panorama images and generate home descriptions. ZInD-Agent outperforms naïve methods in both tasks, hence, can be considered as a complement to the naïve to show potential use of the data and impact of geometry. We believe this work initiates new trajectories in leveraging Computer Vision techniques to analyze indoor panorama images descriptively by learning the latent relation between vision, geometry, and language modalities.