# GaussianCut: Interactive segmentation via graph cut for 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [GaussianEditor: Swift and Controllable 3D Editing with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14521/) (2023)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05606/) (2021)
- [Neural Feature Fusion Fields: 3D Distillation of Self-Supervised 2D Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03494/) (2022)
- [Segment and Track Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06558/) (2023)
- [GaussianEditor: Editing 3D Gaussians Delicately with Text Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16037/) (2023)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [SPIn-NeRF: Multiview Segmentation and Perceptual Inpainting with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12254/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Open-vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14093/) (2023)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [ReferSplat: Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08252/) (2025)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09977/) (2025)
- [Segment then Splat: Unified 3D Open-Vocabulary Segmentation via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22204/) (2025)
- [Pointmap Association and Piecewise-Plane Constraint for Consistent and Compact 3D Gaussian Segmentation Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16303/) (2025)
- [SAGOnline: Segment Any Gaussians Online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08219/) (2025)
- [3D Scene Change Modeling With Consistent Multi-View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22830/) (2025)
- [Remove360: Benchmarking Residuals After Object Removal in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11431/) (2025)
- [Physics-Aware 3D Gaussian Editing for Driving Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25373/) (2026)
- [Is there anything left? Measuring semantic residuals of objects removed from 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17574/) (2025)
- [DSG-World: Learning a 3D Gaussian World Model from Dual State Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05217/) (2025)
- [Fix False Transparency by Noise Guided Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15736/) (2025)
- [Object-Centric 3D Gaussian Splatting for Strawberry Plant Reconstruction and Phenotyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02207/) (2025)
- [Online Segment 3D Gaussians via Launching Virtual Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01628/) (2026)
- [FHGS: Feature-Homogenized Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19154/) (2025)
- [CrashSplat: 2D to 3D Vehicle Damage Segmentation in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23947/) (2025)
- [ClickSeg3D: Few-Click Interactive Segmentation via Semantic Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08925/) (2026)
- [Fast and Compact Graph Cuts for the Boykov-Kolmogorov Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13402/) (2026)
- [E3DGS: Unified Geometric-Photometric Equivariance for 3D Gaussian Splatting via Color-as-Geometry Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15536/) (2026)
- [Scene2Sound: Auditory-Grounded Soundscape Generation for 3D Gaussian Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00463/) (2026)
- [Implicit representations are dead. Long live explicit primitives!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10001/) (2026)
- [LEGO: Leveled Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10057/) (2026)
- [Beyond Similarity Matching: Structured Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Referring Segmentation in 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16103/) (2026)
- [CapFrame: Text-Instructed Viewpoint Grounding in 3D Gaussian Scenes via Geometric Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30342/) (2026)
- [An overview of 3D Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05583/) (2026)
- [PePESeg3D: Perception Prior Enhances Multi-Scale Segmentation for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28645/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce GaussianCut, a new method for interactive multiview segmentation of scenes represented as 3D Gaussians. Our approach allows for selecting the objects to be segmented by interacting with a single view. It accepts intuitive user input, such as point clicks, coarse scribbles, or text. Using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as the underlying scene representation simplifies the extraction of objects of interest which are considered to be a subset of the scene's Gaussians. Our key idea is to represent the scene as a graph and use the graph-cut algorithm to minimize an energy function to effectively partition the Gaussians into foreground and background. To achieve this, we construct a graph based on scene Gaussians and devise a segmentation-aligned energy function on the graph to combine user inputs with scene properties. To obtain an initial coarse segmentation, we leverage 2D image/video segmentation models and further refine these coarse estimates using our graph construction. Our empirical evaluations show the adaptability of GaussianCut across a diverse set of scenes. GaussianCut achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches for 3D segmentation without requiring any additional segmentation-aware training.