# 3D Segmentation of Humans in Point Clouds with Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.00786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00786/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [SoftGroup for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01509/) (2022)
- [RIO: 3D Object Instance Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06109/) (2019)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03650/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Real-World Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19199/) (2025)
- [Search3D: Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18431/) (2024)
- [P2P-Bridge: Diffusion Bridges for 3D Point Cloud Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16325/) (2024)
- [Spot-Compose: A Framework for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval and Drawer Manipulation in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12440/) (2024)
- [LABELMAKER: Automatic Semantic Label Generation from RGB-D Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12174/) (2023)
- [ALSTER: A Local Spatio-Temporal Expert for Online 3D Semantic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18068/) (2023)
- [OpenDAS: Open-Vocabulary Domain Adaptation for 2D and 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20141/) (2024)
- [Diversifying Human Pose in Synthetic Data for Aerial-view Human Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15939/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Part Segmentation of 3D Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19782/) (2025)
- [Subspace Prototype Guidance for Mitigating Class Imbalance in Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10537/) (2024)
- [SLAG: Scalable Language-Augmented Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08124/) (2025)
- [DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05083/) (2024)
- [OpenCity3D: What do Vision-Language Models know about Urban Environments?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16776/) (2025)
- [Facing Asymmetry -- Uncovering the Causal Link between Facial Symmetry and Expression Classifiers using Synthetic Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15927/) (2024)
- [Robust Human Registration with Body Part Segmentation on Noisy Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03602/) (2025)
- [PARTE: Part-Guided Texturing for 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17332/) (2025)
- [ELMO: Enhanced Real-time LiDAR Motion Capture through Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06963/) (2024)
- [Part Segmentation of Human Meshes via Multi-View Human Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18655/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical and Holistic Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15753/) (2026)
- [Ordered Diffusion for 3D Human Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05804/) (2026)
- [Point Cloud Segmentation of Agricultural Vehicles using 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05009/) (2025)
- [Towards Automated Initial Probe Placement in Transthoracic Teleultrasound Using Human Mesh and Skeleton Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11257/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segmenting humans in 3D indoor scenes has become increasingly important with the rise of human-centered robotics and AR/VR applications. To this end, we propose the task of joint 3D human semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and multi-human body-part segmentation. Few works have attempted to directly segment humans in cluttered 3D scenes, which is largely due to the lack of annotated training data of humans interacting with 3D scenes. We address this challenge and propose a framework for generating training data of synthetic humans interacting with real 3D scenes. Furthermore, we propose a novel transformer-based model, Human3D, which is the first end-to-end model for segmenting multiple human instances and their body-parts in a unified manner. The key advantage of our synthetic data generation framework is its ability to generate diverse and realistic human-scene interactions, with highly accurate ground truth. Our experiments show that pre-training on synthetic data improves performance on a wide variety of 3D human segmentation tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that Human3D outperforms even task-specific state-of-the-art 3D segmentation methods.