# Scene as Occupancy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02851 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02851/

## Key facts

- Cited by 209 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07817/) (2023)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [MonoScene: Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00726/) (2021)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [Occ3D: A Large-Scale 3D Occupancy Prediction Benchmark for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14365/) (2023)
- [VoxFormer: Sparse Voxel Transformer for Camera-based 3D Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12251/) (2023)
- [HDMapNet: An Online HD Map Construction and Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06307/) (2021)
- [Cross-view Transformers for real-time Map-view Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02833/) (2022)
- [OpenOccupancy: A Large Scale Benchmark for Surrounding Semantic Occupancy Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03991/) (2023)
- [Panoptic nuScenes: A Large-Scale Benchmark for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03805/) (2021)
- [PersFormer: 3D Lane Detection via Perspective Transformer and the OpenLane Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11089/) (2022)
- [OccDepth: A Depth-Aware Method for 3D Semantic Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13540/) (2023)
- [SceneRF: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Scene Reconstruction with Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02501/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 209)

- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDrive: Truncated Diffusion Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15139/) (2024)
- [OccWorld: Learning a 3D Occupancy World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16038/) (2023)
- [DriveMLM: Aligning Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Behavioral Planning States for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09245/) (2023)
- [GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11502/) (2024)
- [A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10813/) (2023)
- [GaussianFormer: Scene as Gaussians for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17429/) (2024)
- [EmbodiedScan: A Holistic Multi-Modal 3D Perception Suite Towards Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16170/) (2023)
- [SelfOcc: Self-Supervised Vision-Based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12754/) (2023)
- [RenderOcc: Vision-Centric 3D Occupancy Prediction with 2D Rendering Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09502/) (2023)
- [Epona: Autoregressive Diffusion World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24113/) (2025)
- [PanoOcc: Unified Occupancy Representation for Camera-based 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10013/) (2023)
- [UniScene: Unified Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05435/) (2024)
- [Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17655/) (2023)
- [COTR: Compact Occupancy TRansformer for Vision-based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01919/) (2023)
- [SparseOcc: Rethinking Sparse Latent Representation for Vision-Based Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09502/) (2024)
- [World4Drive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Intention-aware Physical Latent World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00603/) (2025)
- [WoVoGen: World Volume-aware Diffusion for Controllable Multi-camera Driving Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02934/) (2023)
- [Symphonize 3D Semantic Scene Completion with Contextual Instance Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15670/) (2023)
- [GaussianFormer-2: Probabilistic Gaussian Superposition for Efficient 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04384/) (2024)
- [OccSora: 4D Occupancy Generation Models as World Simulators for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20337/) (2024)
- [GaussianWorld: Gaussian World Model for Streaming 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10373/) (2024)
- [3D and 4D World Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07996/) (2025)
- [DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19505/) (2024)
- [Fully Sparse 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17118/) (2023)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [A Survey of World Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11260/) (2025)
- [Cam4DOcc: Benchmark for Camera-Only 4D Occupancy Forecasting in Autonomous Driving Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17663/) (2023)
- [GaussianOcc: Fully Self-supervised and Efficient 3D Occupancy Estimation with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11447/) (2024)
- [OctreeOcc: Efficient and Multi-Granularity Occupancy Prediction Using Octree Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03774/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human driver can easily describe the complex traffic scene by visual system. Such an ability of precise perception is essential for driver's planning. To achieve this, a geometry-aware representation that quantizes the physical 3D scene into structured grid map with semantic labels per cell, termed as 3D Occupancy, would be desirable. Compared to the form of bounding box, a key insight behind occupancy is that it could capture the fine-grained details of critical obstacles in the scene, and thereby facilitate subsequent tasks. Prior or concurrent literature mainly concentrate on a single scene completion task, where we might argue that the potential of this occupancy representation might obsess broader impact. In this paper, we propose OccNet, a multi-view vision-centric pipeline with a cascade and temporal voxel decoder to reconstruct 3D occupancy. At the core of OccNet is a general occupancy embedding to represent 3D physical world. Such a descriptor could be applied towards a wide span of driving tasks, including detection, segmentation and planning. To validate the effectiveness of this new representation and our proposed algorithm, we propose OpenOcc, the first dense high-quality 3D occupancy benchmark built on top of nuScenes. Empirical experiments show that there are evident performance gain across multiple tasks, e.g., motion planning could witness a collision rate reduction by 15%-58%, demonstrating the superiority of our method.