Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is challenging but essential for scene understanding tasks such as object localization and segmentation. Language-embedded scene representations have made progress by incorporating language features into 3D spaces. However their efficacy heavily depends on neural networks that are resource-intensive in training and rendering. Although recent 3D Gaussians offer efficient and high-quality novel view synthesis directly embedding language features in them leads to prohibitive memory usage and decreased performance. In this work we introduce Language Embedded 3D Gaussians a novel scene representation for open-vocabulary query tasks. Instead of embedding high-dimensional raw semantic features on 3D Gaussians we propose a dedicated quantization scheme that drastically alleviates the memory requirement and a novel embedding procedure that achieves smoother yet high accuracy query countering the multi-view feature inconsistencies and the high-frequency inductive bias in point-based representations. Our comprehensive experiments show that our representation achieves the best visual quality and language querying accuracy across current language-embedded representations while maintaining real-time rendering frame rates on a single desktop GPU.