# Open-Vocabulary Online Semantic Mapping for SLAM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15043/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13631/) (2023)
- [Data Filtering Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17425/) (2023)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [FeatureSLAM: Feature-enriched 3D gaussian splatting SLAM in real time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05738/) (2026)
- [GS4: Generalizable Sparse Splatting Semantic SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06517/) (2025)
- [OnlinePG: Online Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Mapping with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18510/) (2026)
- [IRIS-SLAM: Unified Geo-Instance Representations for Robust Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18709/) (2026)
- [FUS3DMaps: Scalable and Accurate Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping by 3D Fusion of Voxel- and Instance-Level Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03669/) (2026)
- [HoloAgent-0: A Unified Embodied Agent Framework with 3D Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23565/) (2026)
- [Cross-Attentive Multiview Fusion of Vision-Language Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12551/) (2026)
- [Robotic Contextual Awareness for Human-Robot Collaboration and Environmental Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10372/) (2026)
- [VOIM: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Mapping for RGB-D and Monocular SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00775/) (2026)
- [Finder: Agentic Closed-Loop Object Finding for Embodied Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18058/) (2026)
- [PerSeM: Persistent Semantic Memory for Long-Horizon Open-Vocabulary UAV Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19542/) (2026)
- [TRACKGRAPH: Online Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs via Image-Space Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31005/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents an Open-Vocabulary Online 3D semantic mapping pipeline, that we denote by its acronym OVO. Given a sequence of posed RGB-D frames, we detect and track 3D segments, which we describe using CLIP vectors. These are computed from the viewpoints where they are observed by a novel CLIP merging method. Notably, our OVO has a significantly lower computational and memory footprint than offline baselines, while also showing better segmentation metrics than offline and online ones. Along with superior segmentation performance, we also show experimental results of our mapping contributions integrated with two different full SLAM backbones (Gaussian-SLAM and ORB-SLAM2), being the first ones using a neural network to merge CLIP descriptors and demonstrating end-to-end open-vocabulary online 3D mapping with loop closure.