TempNet: Online Semantic Segmentation on Large-Scale Point Cloud Series

Online semantic segmentation on a time series of point cloud frames is an essential task in autonomous driving. Existing models focus on single-frame segmentation, which cannot achieve satisfactory segmentation accuracy and offer unstably flicker among frames. In this paper, we propose a light-weight semantic segmentation framework for large-scale point cloud series, called TempNet, which can improve both the accuracy and the stability of existing semantic segmentation models by combining a novel frame aggregation scheme. To be computational cost efficient, feature extraction and aggregation are only conducted on a small portion of key frames via a temporal feature aggregation (TFA) network using an attentional pooling mechanism, and such enhanced features are propagated to the intermediate non-key frames. To avoid information loss from non-key frames, a partial feature update (PFU) network is designed to partially update the propagated features with the local features extracted on a non-key frame if a large disparity between the two is quickly assessed. As a result, consistent and information-rich features can be obtained for each frame. We implement TempNet on five state-of-the-art (SOTA) point cloud segmentation models and conduct extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset. Results demonstrate that TempNet outperforms SOTA competitors by wide margins with little extra computational cost.