# U3DS3: Unsupervised 3D Semantic Scene Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06018/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2023.

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

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [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)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (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)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09165/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [PiCIE: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation using Invariance and Equivariance in Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17070/) (2021)
- [xMUDA: Cross-Modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12676/) (2019)
- [Guided Point Contrastive Learning for Semi-supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08188/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08247/) (2020)
- [On the Design Fundamentals of Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04542/) (2023)
- [Labels4Free: Unsupervised Segmentation using StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14968/) (2021)
- [Fully-Convolutional Point Networks for Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06840/) (2018)
- [Box-supervised Instance Segmentation with Level Set Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09055/) (2022)
- [GrowSP: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16404/) (2023)
- [Less is More: Reducing Task and Model Complexity for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11203/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Part Segmentation through Disentangling Appearance and Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12405/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [RAPiD-Seg: Range-Aware Pointwise Distance Distribution Networks for 3D LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10159/) (2024)
- [LeAP: Consistent multi-domain 3D labeling using Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03901/) (2025)
- [LogoSP: Local-global Grouping of Superpoints for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07857/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised deep learning for semantic segmentation of multispectral LiDAR forest point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06227/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised semantic segmentation of urban high-density multispectral point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18520/) (2024)
- [Aligning Instance-Semantic Sparse Representation towards Unsupervised Object Segmentation and Shape Abstraction with Repeatable Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06947/) (2025)
- [DiSCO-3D : Discovering and segmenting Sub-Concepts from Open-vocabulary queries in NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14596/) (2025)
- [EZ-SP: Fast and Lightweight Superpoint-Based 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00385/) (2025)
- [P-SLCR: Unsupervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Prototypes Structure Learning and Consistent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06321/) (2026)
- [PointGS: Semantic-Consistent Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11520/) (2026)
- [Label-Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02372/) (2025)
- [3D Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Class-Aware and Geometry-Guided Pseudo-Label Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17875/) (2025)
- [CUS3D :CLIP-based Unsupervised 3D Segmentation via Object-level Denoise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13982/) (2024)
- [Distill, Diffuse, Segment: Unsupervised 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving Based on Multi-Level Distillation and Graph Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08293/) (2026)
- [Resolving Long-Tail Ambiguity in Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20737/) (2026)
- [MSSP: Multi-Scale Spatially-Constrained Partition for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06959/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contemporary point cloud segmentation approaches largely rely on richly annotated 3D training data. However, it is both time-consuming and challenging to obtain consistently accurate annotations for such 3D scene data. Moreover, there is still a lack of investigation into fully unsupervised scene segmentation for point clouds, especially for holistic 3D scenes. This paper presents U3DS3, as a step towards completely unsupervised point cloud segmentation for any holistic 3D scenes. To achieve this, U3DS3 leverages a generalized unsupervised segmentation method for both object and background across both indoor and outdoor static 3D point clouds with no requirement for model pre-training, by leveraging only the inherent information of the point cloud to achieve full 3D scene segmentation. The initial step of our proposed approach involves generating superpoints based on the geometric characteristics of each scene. Subsequently, it undergoes a learning process through a spatial clustering-based methodology, followed by iterative training using pseudo-labels generated in accordance with the cluster centroids. Moreover, by leveraging the invariance and equivariance of the volumetric representations, we apply the geometric transformation on voxelized features to provide two sets of descriptors for robust representation learning. Finally, our evaluation provides state-of-the-art results on the ScanNet and SemanticKITTI, and competitive results on the S3DIS, benchmark datasets.