  Vision foundation models such as Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-training
(CLIP) and Segment Anything (SAM) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot
performance on image classification and segmentation tasks. However, the
incorporation of CLIP and SAM for label-free scene understanding has yet to be
explored. In this paper, we investigate the potential of vision foundation
models in enabling networks to comprehend 2D and 3D worlds without labelled
data. The primary challenge lies in effectively supervising networks under
extremely noisy pseudo labels, which are generated by CLIP and further
exacerbated during the propagation from the 2D to the 3D domain. To tackle
these challenges, we propose a novel Cross-modality Noisy Supervision (CNS)
method that leverages the strengths of CLIP and SAM to supervise 2D and 3D
networks simultaneously. In particular, we introduce a prediction consistency
regularization to co-train 2D and 3D networks, then further impose the
networks' latent space consistency using the SAM's robust feature
representation. Experiments conducted on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets
demonstrate the superior performance of our method in understanding 2D and 3D
open environments. Our 2D and 3D network achieves label-free semantic
segmentation with 28.4\% and 33.5\% mIoU on ScanNet, improving 4.7\% and 7.9\%,
respectively. For nuImages and nuScenes datasets, the performance is 22.1\% and
26.8\% with improvements of 3.5\% and 6.0\%, respectively. Code is available.
(https://github.com/runnanchen/Label-Free-Scene-Understanding).
