Modern autonomous systems often rely on LiDAR scanners, in particular for autonomous driving scenarios. In this context, reliable scene understanding is indispensable. Current learning-based methods typically try to achieve maximum performance for this task, while neglecting a proper estimation of the associated uncertainties. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for solving the task of uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation using LiDAR point clouds. Our proposed EvLPSNet network is the first to solve this task efficiently in a sampling-free manner. It aims to predict per-point semantic and instance segmentations, together with per-point uncertainty estimates. Moreover, it incorporates methods for improving the performance by employing the predicted uncertainties. We provide several strong baselines combining state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation networks with sampling-free uncertainty estimation techniques. Extensive evaluations show that we achieve the best performance on uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation quality and calibration compared to these baselines. We make our code available at: https://github.com/kshitij3112/EvLPSNet
Panoptic segmentation is the recently introduced task that tackles semantic segmentation and instance segmentation jointly. In this paper, we present an extension of SemanticKITTI, which is a large-scale dataset providing dense point-wise semantic labels for all sequences of the KITTI Odometry Benchmark, for training and evaluation of laser-based panoptic segmentation. We provide the data and discuss the processing steps needed to enrich a given semantic annotation with temporally consistent instance information, i.e., instance information that supplements the semantic labels and identifies th…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
Temporal semantic scene understanding is critical for self-driving cars or robots operating in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose 4D panoptic LiDAR segmentation to assign a semantic class and a temporally-consistent instance ID to a sequence of 3D points. To this end, we present an approach and a point-centric evaluation metric. Our approach determines a semantic class for every point while modeling object instances as probability distributions in the 4D spatio-temporal domain. We process multiple point clouds in parallel and resolve point-to-instance associations, effectively all…
LiDAR panoptic segmentation is a newly proposed technical task for autonomous driving. In contrast to popular end-to-end deep learning solutions, we propose a hybrid method with an existing semantic segmentation network to extract semantic information and a traditional LiDAR point cloud cluster algorithm to split each instance object. We argue geometry-based traditional clustering algorithms are worth being considered by showing a state-of-the-art performance among all published end-to-end deep learning solutions on the panoptic segmentation leaderboard of the SemanticKITTI dataset. To our bes…
Panoptic segmentation presents a new challenge in exploiting the merits of both detection and segmentation, with the aim of unifying instance segmentation and semantic segmentation in a single framework. However, an efficient solution for panoptic segmentation in the emerging domain of LiDAR point cloud is still an open research problem and is very much under-explored. In this paper, we present a fast and robust LiDAR point cloud panoptic segmentation framework, referred to as Panoptic-PolarNet. We learn both semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance clustering in a single inference ne…
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Panoptic segmentation of point clouds is a crucial task that enables autonomous vehicles to comprehend their vicinity using their highly accurate and reliable LiDAR sensors. Existing top-down approaches tackle this problem by either combining independent task-specific networks or translating methods from the image domain ignoring the intricacies of LiDAR data and thus often resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we present the novel top-down Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation (EfficientLPS) architecture that addresses multiple challenges in segmenting LiDAR point clouds includ…
Motional（Motional 公司）；University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）
Panoptic scene understanding and tracking of dynamic agents are essential for robots and automated vehicles to navigate in urban environments. As LiDARs provide accurate illumination-independent geometric depictions of the scene, performing these tasks using LiDAR point clouds provides reliable predictions. However, existing datasets lack diversity in the type of urban scenes and have a limited number of dynamic object instances which hinders both learning of these tasks as well as credible benchmarking of the developed methods. In this paper, we introduce the large-scale Panoptic nuScenes ben…
Scene understanding is a pivotal task for autonomous vehicles to safely navigate in the environment. Recent advances in deep learning enable accurate semantic reconstruction of the surroundings from LiDAR data. However, these models encounter a large domain gap while deploying them on vehicles equipped with different LiDAR setups which drastically decreases their performance. Fine-tuning the model for every new setup is infeasible due to the expensive and cumbersome process of recording and manually labeling new data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques are thus essential to fill t…
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…
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Technical University Nürnberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Reliable scene understanding is indispensable for modern autonomous systems. Current learning-based methods typically try to maximize their performance based on segmentation metrics that only consider the quality of the segmentation. However, for the safe operation of a system in the real world it is crucial to consider the uncertainty in the prediction as well. In this work, we introduce the novel task of uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation, which aims to predict per-pixel semantic and instance segmentations, together with per-pixel uncertainty estimates. We define two novel metrics to fa…
Clustering objects from the LiDAR point cloud is an important research problem with many applications such as autonomous driving. To meet the real-time requirement, existing research proposed to apply the connected-component-labeling (CCL) technique on LiDAR spherical range image with a heuristic condition to check if two neighbor points are connected. However, LiDAR range image is different from a binary image which has a deterministic condition to tell if two pixels belong to the same component. The heuristic condition used on the LiDAR range image only works empirically, which suggests the …
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…
We propose a simple yet effective proposal-free architecture for lidar panoptic segmentation. We jointly optimize both semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance classification in a single network using a pillar-based bird's-eye view representation. The instance classification head learns pairwise affinity between pillars to determine whether the pillars belong to the same instance or not. We further propose a local clustering algorithm to propagate instance ids by merging semantic segmentation and affinity predictions. Our experiments on nuScenes dataset show that our approach outperfo…
Zero-shot 4D segmentation and recognition of arbitrary objects in Lidar is crucial for embodied navigation, with applications ranging from streaming perception to semantic mapping and localization. However, the primary challenge in advancing research and developing generalized, versatile methods for spatio-temporal scene understanding in Lidar lies in the scarcity of datasets that provide the necessary diversity and scale of annotations.To overcome these challenges, we propose SAL-4D (Segment Anything in Lidar--4D), a method that utilizes multi-modal robotic sensor setups as a bridge to distil…
We present a novel end-to-end single-shot method that segments countable object instances (things) as well as background regions (stuff) into a non-overlapping panoptic segmentation at almost video frame rate. Current state-of-the-art methods are far from reaching video frame rate and mostly rely on merging instance segmentation with semantic background segmentation, making them impractical to use in many applications such as robotics. Our approach relaxes this requirement by using an object detector but is still able to resolve inter- and intra-class overlaps to achieve a non-overlapping segm…
Panoptic segmentation aims to address semantic and instance segmentation simultaneously in a unified framework. However, an efficient solution of panoptic segmentation in applications like autonomous driving is still an open research problem. In this work, we propose a novel LiDAR-based panoptic system, called SMAC-Seg. We present a learnable sparse multi-directional attention clustering to segment multi-scale foreground instances. SMAC-Seg is a real-time clustering-based approach, which removes the complex proposal network to segment instances. Most existing clustering-based methods use the d…
University of Michigan-Dearborn（密歇根大学迪尔伯恩分校）；University of Maryland-College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统公司）
Panoptic Segmentation aims to provide an understanding of background (stuff) and instances of objects (things) at a pixel level. It combines the separate tasks of semantic segmentation (pixel level classification) and instance segmentation to build a single unified scene understanding task. Typically, panoptic segmentation is derived by combining semantic and instance segmentation tasks that are learned separately or jointly (multi-task networks). In general, instance segmentation networks are built by adding a foreground mask estimation layer on top of object detectors or using instance clust…
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…
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）
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…
SLAMcore Ltd.（SLAMcore有限公司）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
In this work we introduce a new Bounding-Box Free Network (BBFNet) for panoptic segmentation. Panoptic segmentation is an ideal problem for proposal-free methods as it already requires per-pixel semantic class labels. We use this observation to exploit class boundaries from off-the-shelf semantic segmentation networks and refine them to predict instance labels. Towards this goal BBFNet predicts coarse watershed levels and uses them to detect large instance candidates where boundaries are well defined. For smaller instances, whose boundaries are less reliable, BBFNet also predicts instance cent…
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 …
LiPS: Lightweight Panoptic Segmentation for Resource-Constrained Robotics
Université Paris-Saclay, CEA LIST（巴黎-萨克雷大学，CEA LIST）；U2IS, ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（U2IS、ENSTA、巴黎理工学院）；University of Bonn, Center for Robotics（波恩大学，机器人中心）
3D object detection using LiDAR data is an indispensable component for autonomous driving systems. Yet, only a few LiDAR-based 3D object detection methods leverage segmentation information to further guide the detection process. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task framework that jointly performs 3D object detection and panoptic segmentation. In our method, the 3D object detection backbone in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) plane is augmented by the injection of Range-View (RV) feature maps from the 3D panoptic segmentation backbone. This enables the detection backbone to leverage multi-view inf…
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…
In this paper, we present an algorithm to tackle a video panoptic segmentation problem, a newly emerging area of research. The video panoptic segmentation is a task that unifies the typical task of panoptic segmentation and multi-object tracking. In other words, it requires generating the instance tracking IDs along with panoptic segmentation results across video sequences. Our proposed video panoptic segmentation algorithm uses the transformer and it can be trained in end-to-end with an input of multiple video frames. We test our method on the STEP dataset and report its performance with rece…
Panoptic segmentation, which is a novel task of unifying instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, has attracted a lot of attention lately. However, most of the previous methods are composed of multiple pathways with each pathway specialized to a designated segmentation task. In this paper, we propose to resolve panoptic segmentation in single-shot by integrating the execution flows. With the integrated pathway, a unified feature map called Panoptic-Feature is generated, which includes the information of both things and stuffs. Panoptic-Feature becomes more sophisticated by auxiliary pr…
In this technical report, we present key details of our winning panoptic segmentation architecture EffPS_b1bs4_RVC. Our network is a lightweight version of our state-of-the-art EfficientPS architecture that consists of our proposed shared backbone with a modified EfficientNet-B5 model as the encoder, followed by the 2-way FPN to learn semantically rich multi-scale features. It consists of two task-specific heads, a modified Mask R-CNN instance head and our novel semantic segmentation head that processes features of different scales with specialized modules for coherent feature refinement. Fina…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Two major challenges of 3D LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation (PS) are that point clouds of an object are surface-aggregated and thus hard to model the long-range dependency especially for large instances, and that objects are too close to separate each other. Recent literature addresses these problems by time-consuming grouping processes such as dual-clustering, mean-shift offsets, etc., or by bird-eye-view (BEV) dense centroid representation that downplays geometry. However, the long-range geometry relationship has not been sufficiently modeled by local feature learning from the above methods. To t…
Understanding the scene in which an autonomous robot operates is critical for its competent functioning. Such scene comprehension necessitates recognizing instances of traffic participants along with general scene semantics which can be effectively addressed by the panoptic segmentation task. In this paper, we introduce the Efficient Panoptic Segmentation (EfficientPS) architecture that consists of a shared backbone which efficiently encodes and fuses semantically rich multi-scale features. We incorporate a new semantic head that aggregates fine and contextual features coherently and a new var…
In this work, we present an end-to-end network for fast panoptic segmentation. This network, called Fast Panoptic Segmentation Network (FPSNet), does not require computationally costly instance mask predictions or merging heuristics. This is achieved by casting the panoptic task into a custom dense pixel-wise classification task, which assigns a class label or an instance id to each pixel. We evaluate FPSNet on the Cityscapes and Pascal VOC datasets, and find that FPSNet is faster than existing panoptic segmentation methods, while achieving better or similar panoptic segmentation performance. …
3D Hierarchical Panoptic Segmentation in Real Orchard Environments Across Different Sensors
Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学机器人中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（Lamarr机器学习与人工智能研究所）
School of Computer Science Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Panoptic segmentation unifies semantic segmentation and instance segmentation which has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing research was conducted under a supervised learning setup whereas unsupervised domain adaptive panoptic segmentation which is critical in different tasks and applications is largely neglected. We design a domain adaptive panoptic segmentation network that exploits inter-style consistency and inter-task regularization for optimal domain adaptive panoptic segmentation. The inter-style consistency leverages geometric invariance across …
Panoptic segmentation has become a new standard of visual recognition task by unifying previous semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks in concert. In this paper, we propose and explore a new video extension of this task, called video panoptic segmentation. The task requires generating consistent panoptic segmentation as well as an association of instance ids across video frames. To invigorate research on this new task, we present two types of video panoptic datasets. The first is a re-organization of the synthetic VIPER dataset into the video panoptic format to exploit its large…
Humans have the remarkable ability to perceive objects as a whole, even when parts of them are occluded. This ability of amodal perception forms the basis of our perceptual and cognitive understanding of our world. To enable robots to reason with this capability, we formulate and propose a novel task that we name amodal panoptic segmentation. The goal of this task is to simultaneously predict the pixel-wise semantic segmentation labels of the visible regions of stuff classes and the instance segmentation labels of both the visible and occluded regions of thing classes. To facilitate research o…
In this work, we introduce Panoptic-DeepLab, a simple, strong, and fast system for panoptic segmentation, aiming to establish a solid baseline for bottom-up methods that can achieve comparable performance of two-stage methods while yielding fast inference speed. In particular, Panoptic-DeepLab adopts the dual-ASPP and dual-decoder structures specific to semantic, and instance segmentation, respectively. The semantic segmentation branch is the same as the typical design of any semantic segmentation model (e.g., DeepLab), while the instance segmentation branch is class-agnostic, involving a simp…
Depth-aware video panoptic segmentation tackles the inverse projection problem of restoring panoptic 3D point clouds from video sequences, where the 3D points are augmented with semantic classes and temporally consistent instance identifiers. We propose a novel solution with a multi-task network that performs monocular depth estimation and video panoptic segmentation. Since acquiring ground truth labels for both depth and image segmentation has a relatively large cost, we leverage the power of unlabeled video sequences with self-supervised monocular depth estimation and semi-supervised learnin…
DQFormer: Towards Unified LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation with Decoupled Queries
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院 Cyber-Systems 研究所）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）；Institute of Industrial Technology Research, Zhejiang University（浙江大学工业技术研究院）；Institute of Intelligent and Software Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学智能与软件技术研究所）
This paper presents a novel framework to integrate both semantic and instance contexts for panoptic segmentation. In existing works, it is common to use a shared backbone to extract features for both things (countable classes such as vehicles) and stuff (uncountable classes such as roads). This, however, fails to capture the rich relations among them, which can be utilized to enhance visual understanding and segmentation performance. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel Panoptic, Instance, and Semantic Relations (PISR) module to exploit such contexts. First, we generate panoptic enc…
Domain adaptive panoptic segmentation aims to mitigate data annotation challenge by leveraging off-the-shelf annotated data in one or multiple related source domains. However, existing studies employ two separate networks for instance segmentation and semantic segmentation which lead to excessive network parameters as well as complicated and computationally intensive training and inference processes. We design UniDAformer, a unified domain adaptive panoptic segmentation transformer that is simple but can achieve domain adaptive instance segmentation and semantic segmentation simultaneously wit…
Panoptic segmentation aims to perform instance segmentation for foreground instances and semantic segmentation for background stuff simultaneously. The typical top-down pipeline concentrates on two key issues: 1) how to effectively model the intrinsic interaction between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, and 2) how to properly handle occlusion for panoptic segmentation. Intuitively, the complementarity between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation can be leveraged to improve the performance. Besides, we notice that using detection/mask scores is insufficient for resolv…
Image segmentation for video analysis plays an essential role in different research fields such as smart city, healthcare, computer vision and geoscience, and remote sensing applications. In this regard, a significant effort has been devoted recently to developing novel segmentation strategies; one of the latest outstanding achievements is panoptic segmentation. The latter has resulted from the fusion of semantic and instance segmentation. Explicitly, panoptic segmentation is currently under study to help gain a more nuanced knowledge of the image scenes for video surveillance, crowd counting,…
We propose a novel solution for the task of video panoptic segmentation, that simultaneously predicts pixel-level semantic and instance segmentation and generates clip-level instance tracks. Our network, named VPS-Transformer, with a hybrid architecture based on the state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation network Panoptic-DeepLab, combines a convolutional architecture for single-frame panoptic segmentation and a novel video module based on an instantiation of the pure Transformer block. The Transformer, equipped with attention mechanisms, models spatio-temporal relations between backbone output…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Caltech（加州理工学院）
Panoptic segmentation involves a combination of joint semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, where image contents are divided into two types: things and stuff. We present Panoptic SegFormer, a general framework for panoptic segmentation with transformers. It contains three innovative components: an efficient deeply-supervised mask decoder, a query decoupling strategy, and an improved post-processing method. We also use Deformable DETR to efficiently process multi-scale features, which is a fast and efficient version of DETR. Specifically, we supervise the attention modules in the mas…
We present a single network method for panoptic segmentation. This method combines the predictions from a jointly trained semantic and instance segmentation network using heuristics. Joint training is the first step towards an end-to-end panoptic segmentation network and is faster and more memory efficient than training and predicting with two networks, as done in previous work. The architecture consists of a ResNet-50 feature extractor shared by the semantic segmentation and instance segmentation branch. For instance segmentation, a Mask R-CNN type of architecture is used, while the semantic …
