Fast and Efficient: Mask Neural Fields for 3D Scene Segmentation

Understanding 3D scenes is a crucial challenge in computer vision research with applications spanning multiple domains. Recent advancements in distilling 2D vision-language foundation models into neural fields, like NeRF and 3DGS, enable open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes from 2D multi-view images without the need for precise 3D annotations. However, while effective, these methods typically rely on the per-pixel distillation of high-dimensional CLIP features, introducing ambiguity and necessitating complex regularization strategies, which adds inefficiency during training. This paper presents MaskField, which enables efficient 3D open-vocabulary segmentation with neural fields from a novel perspective. Unlike previous methods, MaskField decomposes the distillation of mask and semantic features from foundation models by formulating a mask feature field and queries. MaskField overcomes ambiguous object boundaries by naturally introducing SAM segmented object shapes without extra regularization during training. By circumventing the direct handling of dense high-dimensional CLIP features during training, MaskField is particularly compatible with explicit scene representations like 3DGS. Our extensive experiments show that MaskField not only surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods but also achieves remarkably fast convergence. We hope that MaskField will inspire further exploration into how neural fields can be trained to comprehend 3D scenes from 2D models.