TORNADO-Net: mulTiview tOtal vaRiatioN semAntic segmentation with Diamond inceptiOn module

Martin Gerdzhev, Ryan Razani, Ehsan Taghavi, Bingbing Liu

Abstract: Semantic segmentation of point clouds is a key component of scene understanding for robotics and autonomous driving. In this paper, we introduce TORNADO-Net - a neural network for 3D LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation. We incorporate a multi-view (bird-eye and range) projection feature extraction with an encoder-decoder ResNet architecture with a novel diamond context block. Current projection-based methods do not take into account that neighboring points usually belong to the same class. To better utilize this local neighbourhood information and reduce noisy predictions, we introduce a combination of Total Variation, Lovász-Softmax, and Weighted Cross-Entropy losses. We also take advantage of the fact that the LiDAR data encompasses 360 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">◦</sup> field of view and use circular padding. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the SemanticKITTI dataset and also provide thorough quantitative evaluations and ablation results.