MASS: Multi-Attentional Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Data for Dense Top-View Understanding
Kunyu Peng, Juncong Fei, Kailun Yang, Alina Roitberg, Jiaming Zhang, Frank Bieder, Philipp Heidenreich, Christoph Stiller, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Abstract
At the heart of all automated driving systems is the ability to sense the surroundings, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g.,</i> through semantic segmentation of LiDAR sequences, which experienced a remarkable progress due to the release of large datasets such as SemanticKITTI and nuScenes-LidarSeg. While most previous works focus on <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sparse</i> segmentation of the LiDAR input, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dense</i> output masks provide self-driving cars with almost complete environment information. In this paper, we introduce MASS - a Multi-Attentional Semantic Segmentation model specifically built for dense top-view understanding of the driving scenes. Our framework operates on pillar- and occupancy features and comprises three attention-based building blocks: (1) a keypoint-driven graph attention, (2) an LSTM-based attention computed from a vector embedding of the spatial input, and (3) a pillar-based attention, resulting in a dense 360° segmentation mask. With extensive experiments on both, SemanticKITTI and nuScenes-LidarSeg, we quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, outperforming the state of the art by 19.0% on SemanticKITTI and reaching 30.4% in mIoU on nuScenes-LidarSeg, where MASS is the first work addressing the dense segmentation task. Furthermore, our multi-attention model is shown to be very effective for 3D object detection validated on the KITTI-3D dataset, showcasing its high generalizability to other tasks related to 3D vision.