# Decomposing 3D Scenes into Objects via Unsupervised Volume Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 88 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [Interaction Networks for Learning about Objects, Relations and Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00222/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [Multi-Object Representation Learning with Iterative Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00450/) (2019)
- [A simple neural network module for relational reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01427/) (2017)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [GENESIS: Generative Scene Inference and Sampling with Object-Centric Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13052/) (2019)
- [Attend, Infer, Repeat: Fast Scene Understanding with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08575/) (2016)
- [BSP-Net: Generating Compact Meshes via Binary Space Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06971/) (2019)
- [SPACE: Unsupervised Object-Oriented Scene Representation via Spatial Attention and Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02407/) (2020)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)
- [CvxNet: Learnable Convex Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05736/) (2019)
- [BlockGAN: Learning 3D Object-aware Scene Representations from Unlabelled Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08988/) (2020)
- [Sequential Attend, Infer, Repeat: Generative Modelling of Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01794/) (2018)
- [Neural Expectation Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03498/) (2017)
- [NeRF-VAE: A Geometry Aware 3D Scene Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00587/) (2021)
- [Relational Neural Expectation Maximization: Unsupervised Discovery of Objects and their Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10353/) (2018)
- [Object-Centric Neural Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08503/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12594/) (2021)
- [NerfDiff: Single-image View Synthesis with NeRF-guided Distillation from 3D-aware Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10109/) (2023)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Open-vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14093/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Object Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07905/) (2021)
- [ClevrTex: A Texture-Rich Benchmark for Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10265/) (2021)
- [Object Scene Representation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06922/) (2022)
- [Object-Centric Slot Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10834/) (2023)
- [SlotDiffusion: Object-Centric Generative Modeling with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11281/) (2023)
- [NeRF-SOS: Any-View Self-supervised Object Segmentation on Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08776/) (2022)
- [DM-NeRF: 3D Scene Geometry Decomposition and Manipulation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07227/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Object Dynamics with Compositional Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11855/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything in 3D with Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12308/) (2023)
- [Gen3DSR: Generalizable 3D Scene Reconstruction via Divide and Conquer from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03421/) (2024)
- [FlashSplat: 2D to 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation Solved Optimally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08270/) (2024)
- [NeuralDiff: Segmenting 3D objects that move in egocentric videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09936/) (2021)
- [Invariant Slot Attention: Object Discovery with Slot-Centric Reference Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04973/) (2023)
- [Discovering Objects that Can Move](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10159/) (2022)
- [NeRF2Real: Sim2real Transfer of Vision-guided Bipedal Motion Skills using Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04932/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01634/) (2022)
- [Complex-Valued Autoencoders for Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02075/) (2022)
- [Instance Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04395/) (2023)
- [FWD: Real-time Novel View Synthesis with Forward Warping and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08355/) (2022)
- [LaTeRF: Label and Text Driven Object Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01583/) (2022)
- [Neural Systematic Binder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01177/) (2022)
- [PartAfford: Part-level Affordance Discovery from 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13519/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present ObSuRF, a method which turns a single image of a scene into a 3D model represented as a set of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), with each NeRF corresponding to a different object. A single forward pass of an encoder network outputs a set of latent vectors describing the objects in the scene. These vectors are used independently to condition a NeRF decoder, defining the geometry and appearance of each object. We make learning more computationally efficient by deriving a novel loss, which allows training NeRFs on RGB-D inputs without explicit ray marching. After confirming that the model performs equal or better than state of the art on three 2D image segmentation benchmarks, we apply it to two multi-object 3D datasets: A multiview version of CLEVR, and a novel dataset in which scenes are populated by ShapeNet models. We find that after training ObSuRF on RGB-D views of training scenes, it is capable of not only recovering the 3D geometry of a scene depicted in a single input image, but also to segment it into objects, despite receiving no supervision in that regard.
