1. A method for generating a 3-dimensional (3D) panorama, the method performed by a data processing system and comprising: receiving, by the data processing system, images of a 3D scene; reconstructing, by the data processing system, geometry of a plurality of 3D bubble-views from the images, wherein reconstructing includes: using a structure from motion framework for camera localization; generating a 3D surface mesh model of the scene using multi-view stereo via cylindrical surface sweeping for each bubble-view, wherein the cylindrical surface sweeping quantizes the scene with multiple depth surfaces with respect to a bubble view center and hypothesizes a depth of each light ray to be intersecting with one of the depth surfaces, wherein an intersecting point of each light ray is projected on each depth surface, and thereafter the cylindrical surface sweeping performs forward projection to find correspondences across multiple cameras; and registering multiple 3D bubble-views in a common coordinate system, wherein registering multiple 3D bubble-views in a common coordinate system comprises registering partial images from different bubble-views to form a new coordinate system, and estimating a relative pose from each bubble-view to map images from each bubble-view to the new coordinate system; and displaying the surface mesh models.