3D part segmentation is the process of identifying and categorizing different parts of a 3D object using deep learning techniques.
We present NPNet, a fully non-parametric approach for 3D point-cloud classification and part segmentation. NPNet contains no learned weights; instead, it builds point features using deterministic operators such as farthest point sampling, k-nearest neighbors, and pooling. Our key idea is an adaptive Gaussian-Fourier positional encoding whose bandwidth and Gaussian-cosine mixing are chosen from the input geometry, helping the method remain stable across different scales and sampling densities. For segmentation, we additionally incorporate fixed-frequency Fourier features to provide global context alongside the adaptive encoding. Across ModelNet40/ModelNet-R, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNetPart, NPNet achieves strong performance among non-parametric baselines, and it is particularly effective in few-shot settings on ModelNet40. NPNet also offers favorable memory use and inference time compared to prior non-parametric methods
Dense prediction infers per-pixel values from a single image and is fundamental to 3D perception and robotics. Although real-world scenes exhibit strong structure, existing methods treat it as an independent pixel-wise prediction, often resulting in structural inconsistencies. We propose SHED, a novel encoder-decoder architecture that enforces geometric prior explicitly by incorporating segmentation into dense prediction. By bidirectional hierarchical reasoning, segment tokens are hierarchically pooled in the encoder and unpooled in the decoder to reverse the hierarchy. The model is supervised only at the final output, allowing the segment hierarchy to emerge without explicit segmentation supervision. SHED improves depth boundary sharpness and segment coherence, while demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization from synthetic to the real-world environments. Its hierarchy-aware decoder better captures global 3D scene layouts, leading to improved semantic segmentation performance. Moreover, SHED enhances 3D reconstruction quality and reveals interpretable part-level structures that are often missed by conventional pixel-wise methods.
Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of ships is an important part of maritime monitoring, allowing improved visualization, inspection, and decision-making in real-world monitoring environments. However, most state-ofthe-art 3D reconstruction methods require multi-view supervision, annotated 3D ground truth, or are computationally intensive, making them impractical for real-time maritime deployment. In this work, we present an efficient pipeline for single-view 3D reconstruction of real ships by training entirely on synthetic data and requiring only a single view at inference. Our approach uses the Splatter Image network, which represents objects as sparse sets of 3D Gaussians for rapid and accurate reconstruction from single images. The model is first fine-tuned on synthetic ShapeNet vessels and further refined with a diverse custom dataset of 3D ships, bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world imagery. We integrate a state-of-the-art segmentation module based on YOLOv8 and custom preprocessing to ensure compatibility with the reconstruction network. Postprocessing steps include real-world scaling, centering, and orientation alignment, followed by georeferenced placement on an interactive web map using AIS metadata and homography-based mapping. Quantitative evaluation on synthetic validation data demonstrates strong reconstruction fidelity, while qualitative results on real maritime images from the ShipSG dataset confirm the potential for transfer to operational maritime settings. The final system provides interactive 3D inspection of real ships without requiring real-world 3D annotations. This pipeline provides an efficient, scalable solution for maritime monitoring and highlights a path toward real-time 3D ship visualization in practical applications. Interactive demo: https://dlr-mi.github.io/ship3d-demo/.
Graph-based methods have proven to be effective in capturing relationships among points for 3D point cloud analysis. However, these methods often suffer from suboptimal graph structures, particularly due to sparse connections at boundary points and noisy connections in junction areas. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that integrates a graph smoothing module with an enhanced local geometry learning module. Specifically, we identify the limitations of conventional graph structures, particularly in handling boundary points and junction areas. In response, we introduce a graph smoothing module designed to optimize the graph structure and minimize the negative impact of unreliable sparse and noisy connections. Based on the optimized graph structure, we improve the feature extract function with local geometry information. These include shape features derived from adaptive geometric descriptors based on eigenvectors and distribution features obtained through cylindrical coordinate transformation. Experimental results on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in various point cloud learning tasks, i.e., classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation.
Current foundation models for 3D shapes excel at global tasks (retrieval, classification) but transfer poorly to local part-level reasoning. Recent approaches leverage vision and language foundation models to directly solve dense tasks through multi-view renderings and text queries. While promising, these pipelines require expensive inference over multiple renderings, depend heavily on large language-model (LLM) prompt engineering for captions, and fail to exploit the inherent 3D geometry of shapes. We address this gap by introducing an encoder-only 3D model that produces language-aligned patch-level features directly from point clouds. Our pre-training approach builds on existing data engines that generate part-annotated 3D shapes by pairing multi-view SAM regions with VLM captioning. Using this data, we train a point cloud transformer encoder in two stages: (1) distillation of dense 2D features from visual encoders such as DINOv2 into 3D patches, and (2) alignment of these patch embeddings with part-level text embeddings through a multi-positive contrastive objective. Our 3D encoder achieves zero-shot 3D part segmentation with fast single-pass inference without any test-time multi-view rendering, while significantly outperforming previous rendering-based and feed-forward approaches across several 3D part segmentation benchmarks. Project website: https://souhail-hadgi.github.io/patchalign3dsite/




We address semantic 3D part segmentation: decomposing objects into parts with meaningful names. While datasets exist with part annotations, their definitions are inconsistent across datasets, limiting robust training. Previous methods produce unlabeled decompositions or retrieve single parts without complete shape annotations. We propose ALIGN-Parts, which formulates part naming as a direct set alignment task. Our method decomposes shapes into partlets - implicit 3D part representations - matched to part descriptions via bipartite assignment. We combine geometric cues from 3D part fields, appearance from multi-view vision features, and semantic knowledge from language-model-generated affordance descriptions. Text-alignment loss ensures partlets share embedding space with text, enabling a theoretically open-vocabulary matching setup, given sufficient data. Our efficient and novel, one-shot, 3D part segmentation and naming method finds applications in several downstream tasks, including serving as a scalable annotation engine. As our model supports zero-shot matching to arbitrary descriptions and confidence-calibrated predictions for known categories, with human verification, we create a unified ontology that aligns PartNet, 3DCoMPaT++, and Find3D, consisting of 1,794 unique 3D parts. We also show examples from our newly created Tex-Parts dataset. We also introduce 2 novel metrics appropriate for the named 3D part segmentation task.
This work presents a novel framework for few-shot 3D part segmentation. Recent advances have demonstrated the significant potential of 2D foundation models for low-shot 3D part segmentation. However, it is still an open problem that how to effectively aggregate 2D knowledge from foundation models to 3D. Existing methods either ignore geometric structures for 3D feature learning or neglects the high-quality grouping clues from SAM, leading to under-segmentation and inconsistent part labels. We devise a novel SAM segment graph-based propagation method, named SegGraph, to explicitly learn geometric features encoded within SAM's segmentation masks. Our method encodes geometric features by modeling mutual overlap and adjacency between segments while preserving intra-segment semantic consistency. We construct a segment graph, conceptually similar to an atlas, where nodes represent segments and edges capture their spatial relationships (overlap/adjacency). Each node adaptively modulates 2D foundation model features, which are then propagated via a graph neural network to learn global geometric structures. To enforce intra-segment semantic consistency, we map segment features to 3D points with a novel view-direction-weighted fusion attenuating contributions from low-quality segments. Extensive experiments on PartNet-E demonstrate that our method outperforms all competing baselines by at least 6.9 percent mIoU. Further analysis reveals that SegGraph achieves particularly strong performance on small components and part boundaries, demonstrating its superior geometric understanding. The code is available at: https://github.com/YueyangHu2000/SegGraph.




Convolutional neural networks (CNN) for multi-class segmentation of medical images are widely used today. Especially models with multiple outputs that can separately predict segmentation classes (regions) without relying on a probabilistic formulation of the segmentation of regions. These models allow for more precise segmentation by tailoring the network's components to each class (region). They have a common encoder part of the architecture but branch out at the output layers, leading to improved accuracy. These methods are used to diagnose type B aortic dissection (TBAD), which requires accurate segmentation of aortic structures based on the ImageTBDA dataset, which contains 100 3D computed tomography angiography (CTA) images. These images identify three key classes: true lumen (TL), false lumen (FL), and false lumen thrombus (FLT) of the aorta, which is critical for diagnosis and treatment decisions. In the dataset, 68 examples have a false lumen, while the remaining 32 do not, creating additional complexity for pathology detection. However, implementing these CNN methods requires a large amount of high-quality labeled data. Obtaining accurate labels for the regions of interest can be an expensive and time-consuming process, particularly for 3D data. Semi-supervised learning methods allow models to be trained by using both labeled and unlabeled data, which is a promising approach for overcoming the challenge of obtaining accurate labels. However, these learning methods are not well understood for models with multiple outputs. This paper presents a semi-supervised learning method for models with multiple outputs. The method is based on the additional rotations and flipping, and does not assume the probabilistic nature of the model's responses. This makes it a universal approach, which is especially important for architectures that involve separate segmentation.
Part-level 3D generation is essential for applications requiring decomposable and structured 3D synthesis. However, existing methods either rely on implicit part segmentation with limited granularity control or depend on strong external segmenters trained on large annotated datasets. In this work, we observe that part awareness emerges naturally during whole-object geometry learning and propose Geom-Seg VecSet, a unified geometry-segmentation latent representation that jointly encodes object geometry and part-level structure. Building on this representation, we introduce UniPart, a two-stage latent diffusion framework for image-guided part-level 3D generation. The first stage performs joint geometry generation and latent part segmentation, while the second stage conditions part-level diffusion on both whole-object and part-specific latents. A dual-space generation scheme further enhances geometric fidelity by predicting part latents in both global and canonical spaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniPart achieves superior segmentation controllability and part-level geometric quality compared with existing approaches.
A deep understanding of the physical world is a central goal for embodied AI and realistic simulation. While current models excel at capturing an object's surface geometry and appearance, they largely neglect its internal physical properties. This omission is critical, as properties like volumetric density are fundamental for predicting an object's center of mass, stability, and interaction dynamics in applications ranging from robotic manipulation to physical simulation. The primary bottleneck has been the absence of large-scale, real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce XDen-1K, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset designed for real-world physical property estimation, with a particular focus on volumetric density. The core of this dataset consists of 1,000 real-world objects across 148 categories, for which we provide comprehensive multi-modal data, including a high-resolution 3D geometric model with part-level annotations and a corresponding set of real-world biplanar X-ray scans. Building upon this data, we introduce a novel optimization framework that recovers a high-fidelity volumetric density field of each object from its sparse X-ray views. To demonstrate its practical value, we add X-ray images as a conditioning signal to an existing segmentation network and perform volumetric segmentation. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on downstream robotics tasks. The results show that leveraging the dataset can effectively improve the accuracy of center-of-mass estimation and the success rate of robotic manipulation. We believe XDen-1K will serve as a foundational resource and a challenging new benchmark, catalyzing future research in physically grounded visual inference and embodied AI.