# OpenIns3D: Snap and Lookup for 3D Open-vocabulary Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 82 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Otter: A Multi-Modal Model with In-Context Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03726/) (2023)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Open3DIS: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation with 2D Mask Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10671/) (2023)
- [PARTFIELD: Learning 3D Feature Fields for Part Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11451/) (2025)
- [SAI3D: Segment Any Instance in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11557/) (2023)
- [SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04383/) (2024)
- [MaskClustering: View Consensus based Mask Graph Clustering for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07745/) (2024)
- [Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16652/) (2025)
- [Concerto: Joint 2D-3D Self-Supervised Learning Emerges Spatial Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23607/) (2025)
- [SAMPro3D: Locating SAM Prompts in 3D for Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17707/) (2023)
- [OA-CNNs: Omni-Adaptive Sparse CNNs for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14418/) (2024)
- [When LLMs step into the 3D World: A Survey and Meta-Analysis of 3D Tasks via Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10255/) (2024)
- [Self-Calibrated CLIP for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15869/) (2024)
- [Beyond Bare Queries: Open-Vocabulary Object Grounding with 3D Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07113/) (2024)
- [VEON: Vocabulary-Enhanced Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12294/) (2024)
- [3DSceneEditor: Controllable 3D Scene Editing with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01583/) (2024)
- [Mosaic3D: Foundation Dataset and Model for Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02548/) (2025)
- [PartSTAD: 2D-to-3D Part Segmentation Task Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05906/) (2024)
- [Functionality understanding and segmentation in 3D scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16310/) (2024)
- [RelationField: Relate Anything in Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13652/) (2024)
- [UniM-OV3D: Uni-Modality Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding with Fine-Grained Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11395/) (2024)
- [A Unified Framework for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03263/) (2024)
- [Segment Any 3D Object with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02157/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Multi-modal 3D Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15676/) (2023)
- [Part2Object: Hierarchical Unsupervised 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10084/) (2024)
- [OnlineAnySeg: Online Zero-Shot 3D Segmentation by Visual Foundation Model Guided 2D Mask Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01309/) (2025)
- [Grounding 3D Scene Affordance From Egocentric Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19650/) (2024)
- [Diorama: Unleashing Zero-shot Single-view 3D Indoor Scene Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19492/) (2024)
- [Masked Point-Entity Contrast for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19500/) (2025)
- [Generalized Decoupled Learning for Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11256/) (2025)
- [PointSeg: A Training-Free Paradigm for 3D Scene Segmentation via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06403/) (2024)
- [Multimodal 3D Reasoning Segmentation with Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13927/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce OpenIns3D, a new 3D-input-only framework for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds, the "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision-language models to extract interesting objects, and the "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" to assign category names to the proposed masks. This approach, yet simple, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of 3D open-vocabulary tasks, including recognition, object detection, and instance segmentation, on both indoor and outdoor datasets. Moreover, OpenIns3D facilitates effortless switching between different 2D detectors without requiring retraining. When integrated with powerful 2D open-world models, it achieves excellent results in scene understanding tasks. Furthermore, when combined with LLM-powered 2D models, OpenIns3D exhibits an impressive capability to comprehend and process highly complex text queries that demand intricate reasoning and real-world knowledge. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/OpenIns3D/
