HAECcity: Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding of City-Scale Point Clouds with Superpoint Graph Clustering

Alexander M. Rusnak, Frederic Kaplan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2025, pp. 5295-5304

Traditional 3D scene understanding techniques are generally predicated on hand-annotated label sets, but in recent years a new class of open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding techniques has emerged. Despite the success of this paradigm on small scenes, existing approaches cannot scale efficiently to city-scale 3D datasets. In this paper, we present Hiearchical vocab-Agnostic Expert Clustering (HAEC), after the latin word for `this', a superpoint graph clustering based approach which utilizes a novel mixture of experts graph transformer for its backbone. We administer this highly scalable approach to the first application of open-vocabulary scene understanding on the SensatUrban city-scale dataset. We also demonstrate a synthetic labeling pipeline which is derived entirely from the raw point clouds with no hand-annotation. Our technique can help unlock complex operations on dense urban 3D scenes and open a new path forward in the processing of digital twins.