Baking in the Feature: Accelerating Volumetric Segmentation by Rendering Feature Maps

Methods have recently been proposed that densely segment 3D volumes into classes using only color images and expert supervision in the form of sparse semantically annotated pixels. While impressive, these methods still require a relatively large amount of supervision and segmenting an object can take several minutes in practice. Such systems typically only optimize the representation on the scene they are fitting, without leveraging prior information from previously seen images. In this paper, we propose to use features extracted with models pre-trained on large existing datasets to improve segmentation performance on novel scenes. We bake this feature representation into a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) by volumetrically rendering feature maps and supervising on features extracted from each input image. We show that by baking this representation into the NeRF, we make the subsequent classification task much easier. Our experiments show that our method achieves higher segmentation accuracy with fewer semantic annotations than existing methods over a wide range of scenes.