Online Segment 3D Gaussians via Launching Virtual Drones

Liwei Liao, Rongjie Wang, Ronggang Wang

Interactive segmentation of 3D Gaussians offers a compelling opportunity for real-time manipulation of 3D scenes, thanks to the real-time rendering capability of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). However, existing methods require a time-consuming per-scene setup - typically tens of seconds or even minutes - before interactive segmentation can begin on a raw 3DGS scene. This setup involves multi-view mask preparation, mask lifting, and feature distillation, creating a major bottleneck for online applications. To address this limitation, we aim to completely eliminate the setup stage for interactive 3DGS segmentation while keeping the segmentation time practical (under 1 second). In this work, we present SAGO (Segment Any Gaussians Online), a novel setup-free framework for interactive 3DGS segmentation. By introducing virtual drones, our method reframes the 3D segmentation problem as an online Next-Best-View (NBV) planning task formulated within a Markov process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAGO can extract clean 3D assets directly from 3D Gaussians with sub-second latency, thereby enabling a broad range of downstream applications such as object manipulation and scene editing. Moreover, our method achieves over a 50x speedup compared to the previous setup-free 3DGS segmentation frameworks.