ZING-3D: Zero-shot Incremental 3D Scene Graphs via Vision-Language Models
This addresses the need for structured 3D scene understanding in robotics applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VLM methods by adding 3D grounding and incremental capabilities.
The paper tackled the problem of generating 3D scene graphs from visual data without task-specific training, enabling open-vocabulary recognition and incremental updates, and demonstrated effectiveness on Replica and HM3D datasets.
Understanding and reasoning about complex 3D environments requires structured scene representations that capture not only objects but also their semantic and spatial relationships. While recent works on 3D scene graph generation have leveraged pretrained VLMs without task-specific fine-tuning, they are largely confined to single-view settings, fail to support incremental updates as new observations arrive and lack explicit geometric grounding in 3D space, all of which are essential for embodied scenarios. In this paper, we propose, ZING-3D, a framework that leverages the vast knowledge of pretrained foundation models to enable open-vocabulary recognition and generate a rich semantic representation of the scene in a zero-shot manner while also enabling incremental updates and geometric grounding in 3D space, making it suitable for downstream robotics applications. Our approach leverages VLM reasoning to generate a rich 2D scene graph, which is grounded in 3D using depth information. Nodes represent open-vocabulary objects with features, 3D locations, and semantic context, while edges capture spatial and semantic relations with inter-object distances. Our experiments on scenes from the Replica and HM3D dataset show that ZING-3D is effective at capturing spatial and relational knowledge without the need of task-specific training.