# A Comprehensive Survey of 3D Dense Captioning: Localizing and Describing Objects in 3D Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 97 of its 152 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [TOD3Cap: Towards 3D Dense Captioning in Outdoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19589/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05785/) (2024)
- [Prompting Video-Language Foundation Models with Domain-specific Fine-grained Heuristics for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09380/) (2024)
- [Towards Accurate Emotion-Attributed Video Captioning via Fine-grained Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08566/) (2026)
- [Descrip3D: Enhancing Large Language Model-based 3D Scene Understanding with Object-Level Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14555/) (2025)
- [DICArt: Advancing Category-level Articulated Object Pose Estimation in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19565/) (2026)
- [Instance-Adaptive Keypoint Learning with Local-to-Global Geometric Aggregation for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15134/) (2025)
- [Rethinking 3D Dense Caption and Visual Grounding in A Unified Framework through Prompt-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11064/) (2024)
- [Da Yu: Towards USV-Based Image Captioning for Waterway Surveillance and Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19288/) (2025)
- [SSR3D-LLM: Structured Spatial Reasoning via Latent Steps for Fine-Grained Grounding in Unified 3D-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28490/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Three-Dimensional (3D) dense captioning is an emerging vision-language bridging task that aims to generate multiple detailed and accurate descriptions for 3D scenes. It presents significant potential and challenges due to its closer representation of the real world compared to 2D visual captioning, as well as complexities in data collection and processing of 3D point cloud sources. Despite the popularity and success of existing methods, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys summarizing the advancements in this field, which hinders its progress. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of 3D dense captioning, covering task definition, architecture classification, dataset analysis, evaluation metrics, and in-depth prosperity discussions. Based on a synthesis of previous literature, we refine a standard pipeline that serves as a common paradigm for existing methods. We also introduce a clear taxonomy of existing models, summarize technologies involved in different modules, and conduct detailed experiment analysis. Instead of a chronological order introduction, we categorize the methods into different classes to facilitate exploration and analysis of the differences and connections among existing techniques. We also provide a reading guideline to assist readers with different backgrounds and purposes in reading efficiently. Furthermore, we propose a series of promising future directions for 3D dense captioning by identifying challenges and aligning them with the development of related tasks, offering valuable insights and inspiring future research in this field. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of 3D dense captioning, foster further investigations, and contribute to the development of novel applications in multimedia and related domains.