Open-vocabulary scene understanding with online panoptic mapping is essential for embodied applications to perceive and interact with environments. However, existing methods are predominantly offline or lack instance-level understanding, limiting their applicability to real-world robotic tasks. In this paper, we propose OnlinePG, a novel and effective system that integrates geometric reconstruction and open-vocabulary perception using 3D Gaussian Splatting in an online setting. Technically, to achieve online panoptic mapping, we employ an efficient local-to-global paradigm with a sliding window. To build local consistency map, we construct a 3D segment clustering graph that jointly leverages geometric and semantic cues, fusing inconsistent segments within sliding window into complete instances. Subsequently, to update the global map, we construct explicit grids with spatial attributes for the local 3D Gaussian map and fuse them into the global map via robust bidirectional bipartite 3D Gaussian instance matching. Finally, we utilize the fused VLM features inside the 3D spatial attribute grids to achieve open-vocabulary scene understanding. Extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better performance among online approaches, while maintaining real-time efficiency.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of Our Approach . Our system performs online open-vocabulary panoptic mapping from RGB-D streams using a local-to-global paradigm. (a) Maintaining a sliding window W to build locally consistent instance and fuse them globally. (b) Using noisy 2D masks and features from [ 21 , 17 ] to initialize 3D Gaussian segments, which are clustered via multi-cues to form consistent 3D instances. (c) Bidirectional bipartite matching incrementally fuses local instances and spatial attributes into the global map.
Methods
Online
Pano.
ScanNetV2 [ 5 ]
Replica [ 40 ]
mIoU ↑
mAcc. ↑
PRQ (T) ↑
PRQ (S) ↑
mIoU ↑
mAcc. ↑
PRQ (T) ↑
PRQ (S) ↑
LangSplat [ 33 ] ∗
✗
✗
29.47
45.29
22.57
28.44
4.82
10.03
8.29
1.28
OpenGaussian [ 50 ] ∗
✗
✗
24.89
37.35
22.87
19.71
–
–
–
–
OpenScene [ 31 ] ∗
✗
✗
47.63
69.74
43.53
40.43
49.03
62.89
33.04
11.84
InstanceGaussian [ 19 ]
✗
✓
34.14
54.95
39.04
27.41
–
–
–
–
PanoGS [ 57 ]
✗
✓
50.72
70.20
33.84
36.22
54.98
67.35
43.04
30.60
Table 1: 3D Semantic and Panoptic Segmentation Results on ScanNetV2 and Replica Datasets. ∗ indicates the baseline results are taken from [ 57 ] which use the 3D instance obtained from supervised approach [ 44 ] for panoptic comparison (their panoptic results are marked in gray ). We mark the top-3 segmentation results among all approaches in red , green , and blue , respectively.
Figure 3: Qualitative 3D Semantic Segmentation Comparison of ScanNetV2 Dataset . Our approach outperforms recent online approaches, O2V-Mapping [ 42 ] and OnlineAnySeg [ 41 ] , by a large margin. Compared with the offline SOTA PanoGS [ 57 ] , our approach still exists a small performance gap.
Figure 4: Qualitative Results of Open-Vocabulary Query . We use different colors to distinguish different instances found in the query. Compared to OnlineAnySeg [ 41 ] , our approach shows advanced text query capabilities for long-tail and multiple instances scenario.
Figure 5: Left: ablation studies of using different segments clustering cues for local map construction. Right: ablation studies of using different feature grid resolutions. The results are evaluated on ScanNetV2 dataset.
Settings
PRQ (T)
PRQ (S)
#1 NN Match
24.67
22.98
#2 Only Forward Match Ml→g
35.83
38.40
#3 Only Backward Match Mg→l
33.71
42.72
#4 Ours Full Bidirectional Match
37.97
41.81
Table 2: Ablation studies of different matching strategies for global map fusion on ScanNetV2 dataset.
Settings
mIoU
PRQ (T)
PRQ (S)
#1 w/o. Segment Clustering
48.48
32.25
30.68
#2 w/o. Feature Grid F
30.40
26.71
24.92
#3 Ours Full
48.48
37.97
41.81
Table 3: Ablation studies of our system components. The results are evaluated on ScanNetV2 dataset.
Figure 6: Qualitative comparison of using segment clustering.
Figure 8: Runtime Performance of OnlinePG . We divided the system’s time consumption into four parts and statistically analyzed the distribution of the execution time of each part across ten scenarios used by ScanNet. The black dashed line represents the average time.
Figure 9: Visualization Results of 3D Language Features . For better visualization, we perform principal components analysis (PCA) on the high-dimensional language features.
Figure 10: Qualitative Rendering Results . We show the rendered RGB, Depth, and language feature of different scenes.
Figure 11: Qualitative 3D Instance Segmentation Comparison . We show the 3D instance segmentation results from several scenes from ScanNetV2 [ 5 ] and Replica [ 40 ] datasets.
Method
Metrics
Room 0
Room 1
Room 2
Office 0
Office 1
Office 2
Office 3
Office 4
O2V-Mapping [ 42 ]
mIoU
29.25
39.58
32.53
18.78
17.54
20.75
12.59
23.24
mAcc.
38.00
52.60
43.22
27.56
20.25
30.20
17.95
38.47
FPS
3.08
3.05
3.08
3.05
3.10
3.13
3.18
3.28
OnlineAnySeg [ 41 ]
mIoU
46.76
45.13
51.30
37.54
25.38
32.91
25.45
48.23
mAcc.
62.41
67.50
66.84
50.47
31.24
46.99
42.46
59.45
PRQ (T)
30.26
51.65
26.59
45.34
22.10
24.90
16.32
27.17
Table 4: 3D Semantic and Panoptic Segmentation Results on Replica Datasets . We demonstrate the 3D segmentation performance and FPS data of the online method in different scenes of Replica [ 40 ] .
Method
Metrics
0000
0062
0070
0097
0140
0200
0347
0400
0590
0645
O2V-Mapping [ 42 ]
mIoU
35.80
46.09
41.21
26.29
24.25
39.08
27.54
39.74
33.18
28.27
mAcc.
59.92
72.72
55.59
55.73
34.15
63.91
47.12
58.33
49.85
52.22
FPS
3.38
3.43
3.43
3.53
3.40
3.50
3.43
3.38
3.43
3.38
OnlineAnySeg [ 41 ]
mIoU
32.64
31.13
23.26
39.08
12.62
39.32
32.97
33.93
34.66
33.26
mAcc.
50.61
60.73
31.92
69.62
31.86
52.43
54.51
56.42
55.89
58.02
PRQ (T)
42.32
33.47
36.29
71.30
53.32
33.76
38.43
25.97
38.95
56.06
Table 5: 3D Semantic and Panoptic Segmentation Results on ScanNetV2 Datasets . We demonstrate the 3D segmentation performance and FPS data of the online method in different scenes of ScanNetV2 [ 5 ] .
Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction is essential for advanced robotics perception and simulation. However, existing methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) often struggle to simultaneously achieve geometric accuracy, coherent panoptic understanding, and real-time inference frequency in large-scale scenes. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that integrates geometric reinforcement, end-to-end panoptic learning, and efficient rendering. First, to ensure physical realism in large-scale environments, we leverage LiDAR data to construct plane-constrained multimodal Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and employ 2D Gaussian surfels as the map representation, enabling high-precision surface alignment and continuous geometric supervision. Building upon this, to overcome the error accumulation and cumbersome cross-frame association inherent in traditional multi-stage panoptic segmentation pipelines, we design a query-guided end-to-end learning architecture. By utilizing a local cross-attention mechanism within the view frustum, the system lifts 2D mask features directly into 3D space, achieving globally consistent panoptic understanding. Finally, addressing the computational bottlenecks caused by high-dimensional semantic features, we introduce Precise Tile Intersection and a Top-K Hard Selection strategy to optimize the rendering pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves superior geometric and panoptic reconstruction quality in large-scale scenes while maintaining an inference rate exceeding 40 FPS, meeting the real-time requirements of robotic control loops.
Xuan Yu, Yuxuan Xie, Changjian Jiang +4
Department of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China
Incremental open-vocabulary 3D instance-semantic mapping is essential for autonomous agents operating in complex everyday environments. However, it remains challenging due to the need for robust instance segmentation, real-time processing, and flexible open-set reasoning. Existing methods often rely on the closed-set assumption or dense per-pixel language fusion, which limits scalability and temporal consistency. We introduce OVI-MAP that decouples instance reconstruction from semantic inference. We propose to build a class-agnostic 3D instance map that is incrementally constructed from RGB-D input, while semantic features are extracted only from a small set of automatically selected views using vision-language models. This design enables stable instance tracking and zero-shot semantic labeling throughout online exploration. Our system operates in real time and outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary mapping baselines on standard benchmarks.
Open-vocabulary scene understanding is crucial for robotic applications, enabling robots to comprehend complex 3D environmental contexts and supporting various downstream tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, existing methods require pre-built complete 3D semantic maps to construct scene graphs for scene understanding, which limits their applicability in robotic scenarios where environments are explored incrementally. To address this challenge, we propose OGScene3D, an open-vocabulary scene understanding system that achieves accurate 3D semantic mapping and scene graph construction incrementally. Our system employs a confidence-based Gaussian semantic representation that jointly models semantic predictions and their reliability, enabling robust scene modeling. Building on this representation, we introduce a hierarchical 3D semantic optimization strategy that achieves semantic consistency through local correspondence establishment and global refinement, thereby constructing globally consistent semantic maps. Moreover, we design a long-term global optimization method that leverages temporal memory of historical observations to enhance semantic predictions. By integrating 2D-3D semantic consistency with Gaussian rendering contribution, this method continuously refines the semantic understanding of the entire scene. Furthermore, we develop a progressive graph construction approach that dynamically creates and updates both nodes and semantic relationships, allowing continuous updating of the 3D scene graphs. Extensive experiments on widely used datasets and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our OGScene3D on open-vocabulary scene understanding.
Siting Zhu, Ziyun Lu, Guangming Wang +5
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China · University of Cambridge, England · University of Technology Nuremberg, Germany +2