VoxDet: Rethinking 3D Semantic Scene Completion as Dense Object Detection
Wuyang Li, Zhu Yu, Alexandre Alahi
Camera-based Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) aims to reconstruct the 3D geometry and semantics of the surrounding environment. With dense voxel labels, prior works typically formulate SSC as a *dense segmentation task*, independently classifying each voxel. However, this paradigm neglects critical instance-centric discriminability, leading to instance-level incompleteness and adjacent ambiguities. To address this, we highlight a "free lunch" of SSC labels: the voxel-level class label has implicitly told the instance-level insight, which is ever-overlooked by the community. Motivated by this observation, we first introduce a training-free **Voxel-to-Instance (VoxNT) trick**: a simple yet effective method that freely converts voxel-level class labels into instance-level offset labels. Building on this, we further propose **VoxDet**, an instance-centric framework that reformulates the voxel-level SSC as *dense object detection* by decoupling it into two sub-tasks: offset regression and semantic prediction. Specifically, based on the lifted 3D volume, VoxDet first uses (a) Spatially-decoupled Voxel Encoder to generate disentangled feature volumes for the two sub-tasks, which learn task-specific spatial deformation in the densely projected tri-perceptive space. Then, we deploy (b) Task-decoupled Dense Predictor to address SSC via dense detection. Here, we first regress a 4D offset field to estimate distances (6 directions) between voxels and the corresponding object boundaries in the voxel space. The regressed offsets are then used to guide the instance-level aggregation in the classification branch, achieving instance-aware scene completion. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, VoxDet achieves 11.0% and 6.7% relative mIoU gains on the test set of Semantic KITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360, respectively, while reducing 57.9% model parameters with around 1.3$\times$ speed-up. The code will be released to propel the SSC and broader occupancy community.