We propose LU-Net -- for LiDAR U-Net, a new method for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR point cloud. Instead of applying some global 3D segmentation method such as PointNet, we propose an end-to-end architecture for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation that efficiently solves the problem as an image processing problem. We first extract high-level 3D features for each point given its 3D neighbors. Then, these features are projected into a 2D multichannel range-image by considering the topology of the sensor. Thanks to these learned features and this projection, we can finally perform the segmentation using a simple U-Net segmentation network, which performs very well while being very efficient. In this way, we can exploit both the 3D nature of the data and the specificity of the LiDAR sensor. This approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the KITTI dataset, as our experiments show. Moreover, this approach operates at 24fps on a single GPU. This is above the acquisition rate of common LiDAR sensors which makes it suitable for real-time applications.
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Voliro Airborne Robotics（Voliro空中机器人公司）
With the advent of powerful, light-weight 3D LiDARs, they have become the hearth of many navigation and SLAM algorithms on various autonomous systems. Pointcloud registration methods working with unstructured pointclouds such as ICP are often computationally expensive or require a good initial guess. Furthermore, 3D feature-based registration methods have never quite reached the robustness of 2D methods in visual SLAM. With the continuously increasing resolution of LiDAR range images, these 2D methods not only become applicable but should exploit the illumination-independent modalities that co…
Learned pointcloud representations do not generalize well with an increase in distance to the sensor. For example, at a range greater than 60 meters, the sparsity of lidar pointclouds reaches to a point where even humans cannot discern object shapes from each other. However, this distance should not be considered very far for fast-moving vehicles: A vehicle can traverse 60 meters under two seconds while moving at 70 mph. For safe and robust driving automation, acute 3D object detection at these ranges is indispensable. Against this backdrop, we introduce faraway-frustum: a novel fusion strateg…
LiDAR-based 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation are usually implemented in specialized networks with distinctive architectures that are difficult to adapt to each other. This paper presents LidarMultiNet, a LiDAR-based multi-task network that unifies these three major LiDAR perception tasks. Among its many benefits, a multi-task network can reduce the overall cost by sharing weights and computation among multiple tasks. However, it typically underperforms compared to independently combined single-task models. The proposed LidarMultiNet aims to bridge the perfo…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
3D object detection is a fundamental and challenging task for 3D scene understanding, and the monocular-based methods can serve as an economical alternative to the stereo-based or LiDAR-based methods. However, accurately detecting objects in the 3D space from a single image is extremely difficult due to the lack of spatial cues. To mitigate this issue, we propose a simple and effective scheme to introduce the spatial information from LiDAR signals to the monocular 3D detectors, without introducing any extra cost in the inference phase. In particular, we first project the LiDAR signals into the…
LiDAR-based 3D detection in point cloud is essential in the perception system of autonomous driving. In this paper, we present LiDAR R-CNN, a second stage detector that can generally improve any existing 3D detector. To fulfill the real-time and high precision requirement in practice, we resort to point-based approach other than the popular voxel-based approach. However, we find an overlooked issue in previous work: Naively applying point-based methods like PointNet could make the learned features ignore the size of proposals. To this end, we analyze this problem in detail and propose several …
TuSimple（图森未来）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
This technical report presents the 1st place winning solution for the Waymo Open Dataset 3D semantic segmentation challenge 2022. Our network, termed LidarMultiNet, unifies the major LiDAR perception tasks such as 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation in a single framework. At the core of LidarMultiNet is a strong 3D voxel-based encoder-decoder network with a novel Global Context Pooling (GCP) module extracting global contextual features from a LiDAR frame to complement its local features. An optional second stage is proposed to refine the first-stage segmentati…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
In this paper we introduce a novel way to predict semantic information from sparse, single-shot LiDAR measurements in the context of autonomous driving. In particular, we fuse learned features from complementary representations. The approach is aimed specifically at improving the semantic segmentation of top-view grid maps. Towards this goal the 3D LiDAR point cloud is projected onto two orthogonal 2D representations. For each representation a tailored deep learning architecture is developed to effectively extract semantic information which are fused by a superordinate deep neural network. The…
LiDAR-based 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation are two crucial tasks in the perception systems of autonomous vehicles and robots. In this paper, we propose All-in-One Perception Network (AOP-Net), a LiDAR-based multi-task framework that combines 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation. In this method, a dual-task 3D backbone is developed to extract both panoptic- and detection-level features from the input LiDAR point cloud. Also, a new 2D backbone that intertwines Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and convolution layers is designed to further improve the detection task performance…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
The proposal of Pseudo-Lidar representation has significantly narrowed the gap between visual-based and active Lidar-based 3D object detection. However, current researches exclusively focus on pushing the accuracy improvement of Pseudo-Lidar by taking the advantage of complex and time-consuming neural networks. Seldom explore the profound characteristics of Pseudo-Lidar representation to obtain the promoting opportunities. In this paper, we dive deep into the pseudo Lidar representation and argue that the performance of 3D object detection is not fully dependent on the high precision stereo de…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
With the rapid advances of autonomous driving, it becomes critical to equip its sensing system with more holistic 3D perception. However, existing works focus on parsing either the objects (e.g. cars and pedestrians) or scenes (e.g. trees and buildings) from the LiDAR sensor. In this work, we address the task of LiDAR-based panoptic segmentation, which aims to parse both objects and scenes in a unified manner. As one of the first endeavors towards this new challenging task, we propose the Dynamic Shifting Network (DS-Net), which serves as an effective panoptic segmentation framework in the poi…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Agency for Defense Development（国防发展局）；Inha University（仁荷大学）
LiDAR is widely used to capture accurate 3D outdoor scene structures. However, LiDAR produces many undesirable noise points in snowy weather, which hamper analyzing meaningful 3D scene structures. Semantic segmentation with snow labels would be a straightforward solution for removing them, but it requires laborious point-wise annotation. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised learning framework for snow points removal in LiDAR point clouds. Our method exploits the structural characteristic of the noise points: low spatial correlation with their neighbors. Our method consis…
This paper proposes RIU-Net (for Range-Image U-Net), the adaptation of a popular semantic segmentation network for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR point cloud. The point cloud is turned into a 2D range-image by exploiting the topology of the sensor. This image is then used as input to a U-net. This architecture has already proved its efficiency for the task of semantic segmentation of medical images. We demonstrate how it can also be used for the accurate semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR point cloud and how it represents a valid bridge between image processing and 3D point cloud pro…
Leveraging LiDAR-based detectors or real LiDAR point data to guide monocular 3D detection has brought significant improvement, e.g., Pseudo-LiDAR methods. However, the existing methods usually apply non-end-to-end training strategies and insufficiently leverage the LiDAR information, where the rich potential of the LiDAR data has not been well exploited. In this paper, we propose the Cross-Modality Knowledge Distillation (CMKD) network for monocular 3D detection to efficiently and directly transfer the knowledge from LiDAR modality to image modality on both features and responses. Moreover, we…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
State-of-the-art lidar-based 3D object detection methods rely on supervised learning and large labeled datasets. However, annotating lidar data is resource-consuming, and depending only on supervised learning limits the applicability of trained models. Self-supervised training strategies can alleviate these issues by learning a general point cloud backbone model for downstream 3D vision tasks. Against this backdrop, we show the relationship between self-supervised multi-frame flow representations and single-frame 3D detection hypotheses. Our main contribution leverages learned flow and motion …
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Autoliv Research（奥托立夫研究院）
In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road detection using only LIDAR data. Starting from an unstructured point cloud, top-view images encoding several basic statistics such as mean elevation and density are generated. By considering a top-view representation, road detection is reduced to a single-scale problem that can be addressed with a simple and fast fully convolutional neural network (FCN). The FCN is specifically designed for the task of pixel-wise semantic segmentation by combining a large receptive field with high-resolution feature maps. The proposed …
NUC-Net: Non-uniform Cylindrical Partition Network for Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University（天津师范大学计算机与信息工程学院）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Student Mental Health and Intelligence Assessment（天津学生心理健康与智能评估重点实验室）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学院）；Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机科学系）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
With the rapid advances of autonomous driving, it becomes critical to equip its sensing system with more holistic 3D perception. However, existing works focus on parsing either the objects (e.g. cars and pedestrians) or scenes (e.g. trees and buildings) from the LiDAR sensor. In this work, we address the task of LiDAR-based panoptic segmentation, which aims to parse both objects and scenes in a unified manner. As one of the first endeavors towards this new challenging task, we propose the Dynamic Shifting Network (DS-Net), which serves as an effective panoptic segmentation framework in the poi…
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
A fast and accurate panoptic segmentation system for LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving vehicles to understand the surrounding objects and scenes. Existing approaches usually rely on proposals or clustering to segment foreground instances. As a result, they struggle to achieve real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time end-to-end panoptic segmentation network for LiDAR point clouds, called CPSeg. In particular, CPSeg comprises a shared encoder, a dual-decoder, and a cluster-free instance segmentation head, which is able to dynamically pillarize foregro…
The detection of 3D objects from LiDAR data is a critical component in most autonomous driving systems. Safe, high speed driving needs larger detection ranges, which are enabled by new LiDARs. These larger detection ranges require more efficient and accurate detection models. Towards this goal, we propose Range Sparse Net (RSN), a simple, efficient, and accurate 3D object detector in order to tackle real time 3D object detection in this extended detection regime. RSN predicts foreground points from range images and applies sparse convolutions on the selected foreground points to detect objects…
In this work, we present a new paradigm, called 4D-StOP, to tackle the task of 4D Panoptic LiDAR Segmentation. 4D-StOP first generates spatio-temporal proposals using voting-based center predictions, where each point in the 4D volume votes for a corresponding center. These tracklet proposals are further aggregated using learned geometric features. The tracklet aggregation method effectively generates a video-level 4D scene representation over the entire space-time volume. This is in contrast to existing end-to-end trainable state-of-the-art approaches which use spatio-temporal embeddings that …
Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Inceptio（嬴彻科技）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
State-of-the-art methods for large-scale driving-scene LiDAR segmentation often project the point clouds to 2D space and then process them via 2D convolution. Although this corporation shows the competitiveness in the point cloud, it inevitably alters and abandons the 3D topology and geometric relations. A natural remedy is to utilize the3D voxelization and 3D convolution network. However, we found that in the outdoor point cloud, the improvement obtained in this way is quite limited. An important reason is the property of the outdoor point cloud, namely sparsity and varying density. Motivated…
The autonomous car must recognize the driving environment quickly for safe driving. As the Light Detection And Range (LiDAR) sensor is widely used in the autonomous car, fast semantic segmentation of LiDAR point cloud, which is the point-wise classification of the point cloud within the sensor framerate, has attracted attention in recognition of the driving environment. Although the voxel and fusion-based semantic segmentation models are the state-of-the-art model in point cloud semantic segmentation recently, their real-time performance suffer from high computational load due to high voxel re…
Center Focusing Network for Real-Time LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation
Beijing Municipal Key Lab of Multimedia and Intelligent Software Technology（北京市多媒体与智能软件技术重点实验室）；Beijing Institute of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Mogo Auto Intelligence and Telemetics Information Technology Co. Ltd.（摩戈汽车智能与车载信息技术有限公司）
Vicomtech Foundation, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（Vicomtech基金会，巴斯克研究技术联盟（BRTA））；Basque Country University (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））；Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science（Ikerbasque巴斯克科学基金会）；Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC)（多诺斯蒂亚国际物理中心（DIPC））
This paper presents a new approach to 3D object detection that leverages the properties of the data obtained by a LiDAR sensor. State-of-the-art detectors use neural network architectures based on assumptions valid for camera images. However, point clouds obtained from LiDAR are fundamentally different. Most detectors use shared filter kernels to extract features which do not take into account the range dependent nature of the point cloud features. To show this, different detectors are trained on two splits of the KITTI dataset: close range (objects up to 25 meters from LiDAR) and long-range. …
There have been significant advances in neural networks for both 3D object detection using LiDAR and 2D object detection using video. However, it has been surprisingly difficult to train networks to effectively use both modalities in a way that demonstrates gain over single-modality networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates (CLOCs) fusion network. CLOCs fusion provides a low-complexity multi-modal fusion framework that significantly improves the performance of single-modality detectors. CLOCs operates on the combined output candidates before Non-Maximum Suppres…
ItTakesTwo: Leveraging Peer Representations for Semi-supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), University of Adelaide（澳大利亚机器学习研究所（AIML）、阿德莱德大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Erlangen–Nuremberg（埃尔兰根-纽伦堡大学）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, UK（视觉、语音和信号处理中心（CVSSP）、萨里大学）
A unified neural network structure is presented for joint 3D object detection and point cloud segmentation in this paper. We leverage rich supervision from both detection and segmentation labels rather than using just one of them. In addition, an extension based on single-stage object detectors is proposed based on the implicit function widely used in 3D scene and object understanding. The extension branch takes the final feature map from the object detection module as input, and produces an implicit function that generates semantic distribution for each point for its corresponding voxel cente…
Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) has been widely used in autonomous vehicles for perception and localization. However, the cost of a high-resolution LiDAR is still prohibitively expensive, while its low-resolution counterpart is much more affordable. Therefore, using low-resolution LiDAR for autonomous driving is an economically viable solution, but the point cloud sparsity makes it extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a two-stage neural network framework that enables 3D object detection using a low-resolution LiDAR. Taking input from a low-resolution LiDAR point cloud and a mon…
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is an advanced active remote sensing technique working on the principle of time of travel (ToT) for capturing highly accurate 3D information of the surroundings. LiDAR has gained wide attention in research and development with the LiDAR industry expected to reach 2.8 billion $ by 2025. Although the LiDAR dataset is of rich density and high spatial resolution, it is challenging to process LiDAR data due to its inherent 3D geometry and massive volume. But such a high-resolution dataset possesses immense potential in many applications and has great potential in…
Valeo Egypt AI Research（法雷奥埃及人工智能研究院）；Cairo University（开罗大学）
Data scarcity is a bottleneck to machine learning-based perception modules, usually tackled by augmenting real data with synthetic data from simulators. Realistic models of the vehicle perception sensors are hard to formulate in closed form, and at the same time, they require the existence of paired data to be learned. In this work, we propose two unsupervised neural sensor models based on unpaired domain translations with CycleGANs and Neural Style Transfer techniques. We employ CARLA as the simulation environment to obtain simulated LiDAR point clouds, together with their annotations for dat…
In order to make autonomous driving a reality, artificial neural networks have to work reliably in the open-world. However, the open-world is vast and continuously changing, so it is not technically feasible to collect and annotate training datasets which accurately represent this domain. Therefore, there are always domain gaps between training datasets and the open-world which must be understood. In this work, we investigate the domain gaps between high-resolution and low-resolution LiDAR sensors in object detection networks. Using a unique dataset, which enables us to study sensor resolution…
In this paper, we describe a strategy for training neural networks for object detection in range images obtained from one type of LiDAR sensor using labeled data from a different type of LiDAR sensor. Additionally, an efficient model for object detection in range images for use in self-driving cars is presented. Currently, the highest performing algorithms for object detection from LiDAR measurements are based on neural networks. Training these networks using supervised learning requires large annotated datasets. Therefore, most research using neural networks for object detection from LiDAR po…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）
We propose a new method for fusing a LIDAR point cloud and camera-captured images in the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method constructs a new layer called non-homogeneous pooling layer to transform features between bird view map and front view map. The sparse LIDAR point cloud is used to construct the mapping between the two maps. The pooling layer allows efficient fusion of the bird view and front view features at any stage of the network. This is favorable for the 3D-object detection using camera-LIDAR fusion in autonomous driving scenarios. A corresponding deep CNN …
We present a method for detecting and mapping trees in noisy stereo camera point clouds, using a learned 3-D object detector. Inspired by recent advancements in 3-D object detection using a pseudo-lidar representation for stereo data, we train a PointRCNN detector to recognize trees in forest-like environments. We generate detector training data with a novel automatic labeling process that clusters a fused global point cloud. This process annotates large stereo point cloud training data sets with minimal user supervision, and unlike previous pseudo-lidar detection pipelines, requires no 3-D gr…
Multistream Network for LiDAR and Camera-based 3D Object Detection in Outdoor Scenes
Department of Computer Science, The University of Western Australia（西澳大学计算机科学系）；School of Computing & Information Systems, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学计算与信息系）
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
Detecting dynamic objects and predicting static road information such as drivable areas and ground heights are crucial for safe autonomous driving. Previous works studied each perception task separately, and lacked a collective quantitative analysis. In this work, we show that it is possible to perform all perception tasks via a simple and efficient multi-task network. Our proposed network, LidarMTL, takes raw LiDAR point cloud as inputs, and predicts six perception outputs for 3D object detection and road understanding. The network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with 3D sparse co…
In this paper, we present an Assertion-based Multi-View Fusion network (AMVNet) for LiDAR semantic segmentation which aggregates the semantic features of individual projection-based networks using late fusion. Given class scores from different projection-based networks, we perform assertion-guided point sampling on score disagreements and pass a set of point-level features for each sampled point to a simple point head which refines the predictions. This modular-and-hierarchical late fusion approach provides the flexibility of having two independent networks with a minor overhead from a light-w…
Current neural networks-based object detection approaches processing LiDAR point clouds are generally trained from one kind of LiDAR sensors. However, their performances decrease when they are tested with data coming from a different LiDAR sensor than the one used for training, i.e., with a different point cloud resolution. In this paper, R-AGNO-RPN, a region proposal network built on fusion of 3D point clouds and RGB images is proposed for 3D object detection regardless of point cloud resolution. As our approach is designed to be also applied on low point cloud resolutions, the proposed metho…
PACE: Post-Causal Entropy Modeling for Learned LiDAR Point Cloud Compression
School of Information Science and Technology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.（信息科学与技术学院，杭州师范大学，杭州，中国）；School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China（电子科学与工程学院，南京大学，南京，中国）
Robust data association is necessary for virtually every SLAM system and finding corresponding points is typically a preprocessing step for scan alignment algorithms. Traditionally, handcrafted feature descriptors were used for these problems but recently learned descriptors have been shown to perform more robustly. In this work, we propose a local feature descriptor for 3D LiDAR scans. The descriptor is learned using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our proposed architecture consists of a Siamese network for learning a feature descriptor and a metric learning network for matching the des…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
LiDAR point cloud analysis is a core task for 3D computer vision, especially for autonomous driving. However, due to the severe sparsity and noise interference in the single sweep LiDAR point cloud, the accurate semantic segmentation is non-trivial to achieve. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation framework assisted by learned contextual shape priors. In practice, an initial semantic segmentation (SS) of a single sweep point cloud can be achieved by any appealing network and then flows into the semantic scene completion (SSC) module as the input. By m…
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）
Deep learning based LiDAR odometry (LO) estimation attracts increasing research interests in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. Existing works feed consecutive LiDAR frames into neural networks as point clouds and match pairs in the learned feature space. In contrast, motivated by the success of image based feature extractors, we propose to transfer the LiDAR frames to image space and reformulate the problem as image feature extraction. With the help of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) for feature extraction, we are able to generate matched keypoint pairs (MKPs) that can be …
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）
We present a novel deep convolutional network pipeline, LO-Net, for real-time lidar odometry estimation. Unlike most existing lidar odometry (LO) estimations that go through individually designed feature selection, feature matching, and pose estimation pipeline, LO-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner. With a new mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, LO-Net can effectively learn feature representation for LO estimation, and can implicitly exploit the sequential dependencies and dynamics in the data. We also design a scan-to-map module, which uses the geometric and semantic information…
MILA（MILA（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所））；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Building models capable of generating structured output is a key challenge for AI and robotics. While generative models have been explored on many types of data, little work has been done on synthesizing lidar scans, which play a key role in robot mapping and localization. In this work, we show that one can adapt deep generative models for this task by unravelling lidar scans into a 2D point map. Our approach can generate high quality samples, while simultaneously learning a meaningful latent representation of the data. We demonstrate significant improvements against state-of-the-art point clo…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV；Data61 CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）
In this paper, we present LidarStereoNet, the first unsupervised Lidar-stereo fusion network, which can be trained in an end-to-end manner without the need of ground truth depth maps. By introducing a novel "Feedback Loop'' to connect the network input with output, LidarStereoNet could tackle both noisy Lidar points and misalignment between sensors that have been ignored in existing Lidar-stereo fusion studies. Besides, we propose to incorporate a piecewise planar model into network learning to further constrain depths to conform to the underlying 3D geometry. Extensive quantitative and qualit…
