# Point Cloud Instance Segmentation with Semi-supervised Bounding-Box Mining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15210/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Ladder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02672/) (2015)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [OccuSeg: Occupancy-aware 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06537/) (2020)
- [SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08588/) (2017)
- [Learning Object Bounding Boxes for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01140/) (2019)
- [GSPN: Generative Shape Proposal Network for 3D Instance Segmentation in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03320/) (2018)
- [3D-MPA: Multi Proposal Aggregation for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13867/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Aggregation for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02350/) (2021)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07478/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning with Vote2Cap-DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02508/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [DC-Scene: Data-Centric Learning for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15232/) (2025)
- [Learning Inter-Superpoint Affinity for Weakly Supervised 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05534/) (2022)
- [3D CoCa: Contrastive Learners are 3D Captioners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09518/) (2025)
- [A Closer Look at Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18210/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Propagation on Multiple Instance Graphs for 3D Instance Segmentation with Single-point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05110/) (2022)
- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [Sketchy Bounding-box Supervision for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16399/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Confidence-Level-based Contrastive Discrimination for Class-Imbalanced Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15066/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Instance Segmentation without Instance-level Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01721/) (2023)
- [Multi-view Vision-Prompt Fusion Network: Can 2D Pre-trained Model Boost 3D Point Cloud Data-scarce Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10224/) (2023)
- [Generalized Robot 3D Vision-Language Model with Fast Rendering and Pre-Training Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00663/) (2023)
- [EipFormer: Emphasizing Instance Positions in 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05602/) (2023)
- [Towards Modality-agnostic Label-efficient Segmentation with Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16520/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud instance segmentation has achieved huge progress with the emergence of deep learning. However, these methods are usually data-hungry with expensive and time-consuming dense point cloud annotations. To alleviate the annotation cost, unlabeled or weakly labeled data is still less explored in the task. In this paper, we introduce the first semi-supervised point cloud instance segmentation framework (SPIB) using both labeled and unlabelled bounding boxes as supervision. To be specific, our SPIB architecture involves a two-stage learning procedure. For stage one, a bounding box proposal generation network is trained under a semi-supervised setting with perturbation consistency regularization (SPCR). The regularization works by enforcing an invariance of the bounding box predictions over different perturbations applied to the input point clouds, to provide self-supervision for network learning. For stage two, the bounding box proposals with SPCR are grouped into some subsets, and the instance masks are mined inside each subset with a novel semantic propagation module and a property consistency graph module. Moreover, we introduce a novel occupancy ratio guided refinement module to refine the instance masks. Extensive experiments on the challenging ScanNet v2 dataset demonstrate our method can achieve competitive performance compared with the recent fully-supervised methods.