# Box2Mask: Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation Using Bounding Boxes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01203/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [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)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [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)
- [SO-Net: Self-Organizing Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04249/) (2018)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current 3D segmentation methods heavily rely on large-scale point-cloud datasets, which are notoriously laborious to annotate. Few attempts have been made to circumvent the need for dense per-point annotations. In this work, we look at weakly-supervised 3D semantic instance segmentation. The key idea is to leverage 3D bounding box labels which are easier and faster to annotate. Indeed, we show that it is possible to train dense segmentation models using only bounding box labels. At the core of our method, name, lies a deep model, inspired by classical Hough voting, that directly votes for bounding box parameters, and a clustering method specifically tailored to bounding box votes. This goes beyond commonly used center votes, which would not fully exploit the bounding box annotations. On ScanNet test, our weakly supervised model attains leading performance among other weakly supervised approaches (+18 mAP@50). Remarkably, it also achieves 97% of the mAP@50 score of current fully supervised models. To further illustrate the practicality of our work, we train Box2Mask on the recently released ARKitScenes dataset which is annotated with 3D bounding boxes only, and show, for the first time, compelling 3D instance segmentation masks.