OP2GS: Object-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting with Dual-Opacity Primitives
Authors: Guiyu Liu, Niklas Vaara, Janne Mustaniemi, Juho Kannala, Janne Heikkilä
Organizations: Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu, Finland · Aalto University, Finland
Abstract
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an explicit and efficient scene representation, but its primitives lack inherent object-level identity, hindering downstream tasks such as open-vocabulary scene understanding. Existing methods typically address this by either distilling high-dimensional feature embeddings into Gaussians or by lifting 2D mask labels into 3D via heuristic refinement. However, feature-based approaches incur heavy storage and decoding overhead, while lifting-based pipelines remain vulnerable to label contamination: Gaussians necessary for appearance reconstruction often receive incorrect object labels during 2D-to-3D projection. We propose OP2GS, an object-aware Gaussian representation that augments each primitive with an explicit instance identity and a dedicated instance opacity σ∗ for object-mask rendering. The original opacity σ remains responsible for visual reconstruction, while σ∗ models whether a Gaussian should contribute to a particular object mask. This dual-opacity formulation decouples visual existence from instance occupancy: mislabeled Gaussians can remain available for image rendering while becoming transparent in the object-mask branch. To learn this representation, we introduce a random object loss that optimizes the 1D instance occupancy field using the standard transmittance-based visibility of 3DGS. Semantic descriptors are then attached at the object level through multi-view aggregation, eliminating per-Gaussian feature storage. Compared with feature-training approaches, OP2GS achieves competitive open-vocabulary performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Compared with training-free pipelines, it leverages physically consistent occupancy learning to resolve visibility ambiguities.
Open-vocabulary 3D Gaussian segmentation is challenging because it requires language understanding for diverse queries and accurate separation of Gaussians along object boundaries. Prior approaches either embed language knowledge into individual Gaussians to improve query responsiveness or optimize per-Gaussian instance features to encode object identity. However, these strategies may produce noisy Gaussian segmentations or rely on cost-inefficient per-scene optimization. We propose PairGS, a framework that reframes Gaussian segmentation as modeling pairwise relations between Gaussians. 3D Gaussian representations provide rich signals for relation estimation, such as view contribution weights and multi-view mask evidence. By leveraging these cues, PairGS explicitly constructs a relation graph for segmentation without a heavy optimization process. PairGS first proposes sparse edge candidates using low-dimensional descriptors, computes precise pairwise affinities only on those candidates, and builds a hierarchical cluster tree for multi-granular querying. It achieves state-of-the-art results on open-vocabulary 3D Gaussian segmentation benchmarks, while the fast variant is 50x faster than optimization-based instance-feature approaches.
3D Language Gaussian Splatting (3DLGS) augments 3D Gaussian Splatting with language-aligned visual features for open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding. A core challenge is efficiently associating high-dimensional vision-language embeddings with millions of 3D Gaussians while preserving efficient feature rendering for text-based querying. Existing methods either store dense features directly on Gaussians, causing high storage costs and slow rendering, or learn compact representations through expensive per-scene optimization with repeated feature rasterization. No existing method simultaneously achieves fast 3D semantic reconstruction, efficient storage, and fast rendering. We propose SCOUP (Sparse COde UPlifting), which addresses all three by decoupling language representation learning from 3D Gaussian optimization. Rather than working directly in 3D, we learn sparse codebook-based representations entirely using features associated with 2D image regions, associating each region with a sparse set of codebook coefficients. We then uplift these coefficients to 3D Gaussians with our weighted sparse aggregation using Gaussian-to-pixel associations, where each Gaussian accumulates coefficients over codebook atoms across views. Top-K filtering then extracts the most dominant multi-view coefficients per Gaussian, enabling efficient storage and fast rendering. Our method achieves up to 400× training speedup while being 3× more memory efficient during training compared to the state-of-the-art in rendering speed. Across multiple benchmarks, SCOUP matches or outperforms existing methods in open-vocabulary querying accuracy.
Lovre Antonio Budimir, Yushi Guan, Steve Ryhner +2
While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has established new standards for high-fidelity 3D scene modeling, interpreting massive, unstructured Gaussian primitives into meaningful geospatial entities remains a critical challenge for remote sensing and urban applications. Existing 2D-to-3D distillation methods suffer from projection ambiguities, geometric inconsistencies, and computational bottlenecks when applied to complex, large-scale topographies. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack natively aligned 2D-3D ground truth tailored for splatting-based representations. To address these limitations, we propose \textit{PointGauss}, a unified 3D-native framework for robust semantic parsing and instance segmentation. By treating Gaussian primitives as unstructured point sets, PointGauss leverages Point Transformer V3 (PTv3) to extract scale-invariant geometric features directly from Gaussian attributes, effectively resolving projection ambiguities. To ensure scalability in building-scale scenes, we introduce an adaptive region-of-interest cropping strategy and an instance-aware distance-constrained rasterization pipeline for pixel-level, view-consistent projection. Additionally, we present \textbf{SplatSeg-360}, the first rigorous cross-scale benchmark tailored for 3DGS, comprising 32 complex scenes with full 360∘ coverage and over 6,300 natively aligned 2D-3D masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointGauss operates in real-time and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it attains approximately 90% 3D-mIoU in large-scale building scenarios and roughly 80% 2D-mIoU in view-consistent 2D instance segmentation, outperforming baseline methods by 16%. (\href{https://github.com/hbycswt/pointgauss#}{Code})