# PanoGS: Gaussian-based Panoptic Segmentation for 3D Open Vocabulary Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18107/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (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)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [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)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [GaussianDreamer: Fast Generation from Text to 3D Gaussians by Bridging 2D and 3D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08529/) (2023)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04334/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)

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

- [Uni3R: Unified 3D Reconstruction and Semantic Understanding via Generalizable Gaussian Splatting from Unposed Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03643/) (2025)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09977/) (2025)
- [VoteSplat: Hough Voting Gaussian Splatting for 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22799/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Refiner: Boosting Feed-forward Novel View Synthesis via One-Step Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14161/) (2026)
- [EA3D: Online Open-World 3D Object Extraction from Streaming Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25146/) (2025)
- [3AM: 3egment Anything with Geometric Consistency in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08831/) (2026)
- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)
- [OnlinePG: Online Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Mapping with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18510/) (2026)
- [Lang3D-XL: Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Large-scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07807/) (2025)
- [OutLangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for UAV Outdoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04560/) (2026)
- [G2P: Gaussian-to-Point Attribute Alignment for Boundary-Aware 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03510/) (2026)
- [Language and Geometry Grounded Sparse Voxel Representations for Holistic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15734/) (2026)
- [BEA-GS: BEyond RAdiance Supervision in 3DGS for Precise Object Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09662/) (2026)
- [Lighting-Consistent Object Transfer Across Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22481/) (2026)
- [InstanceSplat: Instance-Aware Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07144/) (2026)
- [Beyond Similarity Matching: Structured Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Referring Segmentation in 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16103/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown encouraging performance for open vocabulary scene understanding tasks. However, previous methods cannot distinguish 3D instance-level information, which usually predicts a heatmap between the scene feature and text query. In this paper, we propose PanoGS, a novel and effective 3D panoptic open vocabulary scene understanding approach. Technically, to learn accurate 3D language features that can scale to large indoor scenarios, we adopt the pyramid tri-plane to model the latent continuous parametric feature space and use a 3D feature decoder to regress the multi-view fused 2D feature cloud. Besides, we propose language-guided graph cuts that synergistically leverage reconstructed geometry and learned language cues to group 3D Gaussian primitives into a set of super-primitives. To obtain 3D consistent instance, we perform graph clustering based segmentation with SAM-guided edge affinity computation between different super-primitives. Extensive experiments on widely used datasets show better or more competitive performance on 3D panoptic open vocabulary scene understanding. Project page: hrefhttps://zju3dv.github.io/panogshttps://zju3dv.github.io/panogs.