# MaskClustering: View Consensus based Mask Graph Clustering for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07745 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07745/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (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)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [SoftGroup for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01509/) (2022)
- [OccuSeg: Occupancy-aware 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06537/) (2020)
- [Mask2Former for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10764/) (2021)
- [SAM3D: Segment Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03908/) (2023)
- [Open3DIS: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation with 2D Mask Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10671/) (2023)
- [NeSF: Neural Semantic Fields for Generalizable Semantic Segmentation of 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13260/) (2021)
- [SAM-CLIP: Merging Vision Foundation Models towards Semantic and Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15308/) (2023)
- [PanopticFusion: Online Volumetric Semantic Mapping at the Level of Stuff and Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01177/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional Projection Network for Cross Dimension Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14326/) (2021)
- [High-Quality Entity Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05776/) (2022)
- [Region-Aware Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07011/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation via Robust Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12698/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [InstanceGaussian: Appearance-Semantic Joint Gaussian Representation for 3D Instance-Level Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19235/) (2024)
- [Multiplayer Interactive World Models with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05352/) (2026)
- [PanoGS: Gaussian-based Panoptic Segmentation for 3D Open Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18107/) (2025)
- [MLLM-For3D: Adapting Multimodal Large Language Model for 3D Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18135/) (2025)
- [Any3DIS: Class-Agnostic 3D Instance Segmentation by 2D Mask Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16183/) (2024)
- [MonoInstance: Enhancing Monocular Priors via Multi-view Instance Alignment for Neural Rendering and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18363/) (2025)
- [Segment Any 3D Object with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02157/) (2024)
- [OnlineAnySeg: Online Zero-Shot 3D Segmentation by Visual Foundation Model Guided 2D Mask Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01309/) (2025)
- [IAAO: Interactive Affordance Learning for Articulated Objects in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06827/) (2025)
- [InstaScene: Towards Complete 3D Instance Decomposition and Reconstruction from Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08416/) (2025)
- [Masked Point-Entity Contrast for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19500/) (2025)
- [Multimodal 3D Reasoning Segmentation with Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13927/) (2024)
- [Details Matter for Indoor Open-vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23134/) (2025)
- [Intrinsic Image Fusion for Multi-View 3D Material Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13157/) (2025)
- [OpenObj: Open-Vocabulary Object-Level Neural Radiance Fields with Fine-Grained Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08009/) (2024)
- [OpenScan: A Benchmark for Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11030/) (2024)
- [Leverage Cross-Attention for End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01119/) (2025)
- [ExCap3D: Expressive 3D Scene Understanding via Object Captioning with Varying Detail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17044/) (2025)
- [Zoo3D: Zero-Shot 3D Object Detection at Scene Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20253/) (2025)
- [MoonSeg3R: Monocular Online Zero-Shot Segment Anything in 3D with Reconstructive Foundation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15577/) (2025)
- [FAST3DIS: Feed-forward Anchored Scene Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25993/) (2026)
- [OE3DIS: Open-Ended 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11747/) (2024)
- [GrabS: Generative Embodied Agent for 3D Object Segmentation without Scene Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11754/) (2025)
- [OpenFusion++: An Open-vocabulary Real-time Scene Understanding System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19266/) (2025)
- [ShelfGaussian: Shelf-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Gaussian-based 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03370/) (2025)
- [OpenTrack3D: Towards Accurate and Generalizable Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03532/) (2025)
- [GraphSeg: Segmented 3D Representations via Graph Edge Addition and Contraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03129/) (2025)
- [RAZER: Robust Accelerated Zero-Shot 3D Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Reconstruction with Spatio-Temporal Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15373/) (2025)
- [SGS-3D: High-Fidelity 3D Instance Segmentation via Reliable Semantic Mask Splitting and Growing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05144/) (2025)
- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation is cutting-edge for its ability to segment 3D instances without predefined categories. However, progress in 3D lags behind its 2D counterpart due to limited annotated 3D data. To address this, recent works first generate 2D open-vocabulary masks through 2D models and then merge them into 3D instances based on metrics calculated between two neighboring frames. In contrast to these local metrics, we propose a novel metric, view consensus rate, to enhance the utilization of multi-view observations. The key insight is that two 2D masks should be deemed part of the same 3D instance if a significant number of other 2D masks from different views contain both these two masks. Using this metric as edge weight, we construct a global mask graph where each mask is a node. Through iterative clustering of masks showing high view consensus, we generate a series of clusters, each representing a distinct 3D instance. Notably, our model is training-free. Through extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, including ScanNet++, ScanNet200 and MatterPort3D, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. Our project page is at https://pku-epic.github.io/MaskClustering.
