Abstract:Panoptic segmentation of 3D scenes, involving the segmentation and classification of object instances in a dense 3D reconstruction of a scene, is a challenging problem, especially when relying solely on unposed 2D images. Existing approaches typically leverage off-the-shelf models to extract per-frame 2D panoptic segmentations, before optimizing an implicit geometric representation (often based on NeRF) to integrate and fuse the 2D predictions. We argue that relying on 2D panoptic segmentation for a problem inherently 3D and multi-view is likely suboptimal as it fails to leverage the full potential of spatial relationships across views. In addition to requiring camera parameters, these approaches also necessitate computationally expensive test-time optimization for each scene. Instead, in this work, we propose a unified and integrated approach PanSt3R, which eliminates the need for test-time optimization by jointly predicting 3D geometry and multi-view panoptic segmentation in a single forward pass. Our approach builds upon recent advances in 3D reconstruction, specifically upon MUSt3R, a scalable multi-view version of DUSt3R, and enhances it with semantic awareness and multi-view panoptic segmentation capabilities. We additionally revisit the standard post-processing mask merging procedure and introduce a more principled approach for multi-view segmentation. We also introduce a simple method for generating novel-view predictions based on the predictions of PanSt3R and vanilla 3DGS. Overall, the proposed PanSt3R is conceptually simple, yet fast and scalable, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, while being orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.
Abstract:Structure-from-Motion (SfM), a task aiming at jointly recovering camera poses and 3D geometry of a scene given a set of images, remains a hard problem with still many open challenges despite decades of significant progress. The traditional solution for SfM consists of a complex pipeline of minimal solvers which tends to propagate errors and fails when images do not sufficiently overlap, have too little motion, etc. Recent methods have attempted to revisit this paradigm, but we empirically show that they fall short of fixing these core issues. In this paper, we propose instead to build upon a recently released foundation model for 3D vision that can robustly produce local 3D reconstructions and accurate matches. We introduce a low-memory approach to accurately align these local reconstructions in a global coordinate system. We further show that such foundation models can serve as efficient image retrievers without any overhead, reducing the overall complexity from quadratic to linear. Overall, our novel SfM pipeline is simple, scalable, fast and truly unconstrained, i.e. it can handle any collection of images, ordered or not. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our method provides steady performance across diverse settings, especially outperforming existing methods in small- and medium-scale settings.