SpSequenceNet: Semantic Segmentation Network on 4D Point Clouds

Point clouds are useful in many applications like autonomous driving and robotics as they provide natural 3D information of the surrounding environments. While there are extensive research on 3D point clouds, scene understanding on 4D point clouds, a series of consecutive 3D point clouds frames, is an emerging topic and yet under-investigated. With 4D point clouds (3D point cloud videos), robotic systems could enhance their robustness by leveraging the temporal information from previous frames. However, the existing semantic segmentation methods on 4D point clouds suffer from low precision due to the spatial and temporal information loss in their network structures. In this paper, we propose SpSequenceNet to address this problem. The network is designed based on 3D sparse convolution, and it includes two novel modules, a cross frame global attention module and a cross frame local interpolation module, to capture spatial and temporal information in 4D point clouds. We conduct extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, and achieve the state-of-the-art result of 43.1% on mIoU, which is 1.5% higher than the previous best approach.