OpenOcc: Open Vocabulary 3D Scene Reconstruction via Occupancy Representation

3D reconstruction has been widely used in autonomous navigation fields of mobile robotics. However, the former research can only provide the basic geometry structure without the capability of open-world scene understanding, limiting advanced tasks like human interaction and visual navigation. Moreover, traditional 3D scene understanding approaches rely on expensive labeled 3D datasets to train a model for a single task with supervision. Thus, geometric reconstruction with zero-shot scene understanding i.e. Open vocabulary 3D Understanding and Reconstruction, is crucial for the future development of mobile robots. In this paper, we propose OpenOcc, a novel framework unifying the 3D scene reconstruction and open vocabulary understanding with neural radiance fields. We model the geometric structure of the scene with occupancy representation and distill the pre-trained open vocabulary model into a 3D language field via volume rendering for zero-shot inference. Furthermore, a novel semantic-aware confidence propagation (SCP) method has been proposed to relieve the issue of language field representation degeneracy caused by inconsistent measurements in distilled features. Experimental results show that our approach achieves competitive performance in 3D scene understanding tasks, especially for small and long-tail objects.