Efficient Outdoor 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for Critical Road Objects and Distributed Contexts

Large-scale point cloud semantic understanding is an important problem in self-driving cars and autonomous robotics navigation. However, such problem involves many challenges, such as i) critical road objects (e.g., pedestrians, barriers) with diverse and varying input shapes; ii) distributed contextual information across large spatial range; iii) efficient inference time. Failing to deal with such challenges may weaken the mission-critical performance of self-driving car, e.g, LiDAR road objects perception. In this work, we propose a novel neural network model called Attention-based Dynamic Convolution Network with Self-Attention Global Contexts(ADConvnet-SAGC), which i) applies attention mechanism to adaptively focus on the most related neighboring points for learning the point features of 3D objects, especially for small objects with diverse shapes; ii) applies self-attention module for efficiently capturing long-range distributed contexts from the input; iii) a more reasonable and compact architecture for efficient inference. Extensive experiments on point cloud semantic segmentation validate the effectiveness of the proposed ADConvnet-SAGC model and show significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.