TASeg: Temporal Aggregation Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Xiaopei Wu, Yuenan Hou, Xiaoshui Huang, Binbin Lin, Tong He, Xinge Zhu, Yuexin Ma, Boxi Wu, Haifeng Liu, Deng Cai, Wanli Ouyang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 15311-15320

Training deep models for LiDAR semantic segmentation is challenging due to the inherent sparsity of point clouds. Utilizing temporal data is a natural remedy against the sparsity problem as it makes the input signal denser. However previous multi-frame fusion algorithms fall short in utilizing sufficient temporal information due to the memory constraint and they also ignore the informative temporal images. To fully exploit rich information hidden in long-term temporal point clouds and images we present the Temporal Aggregation Network termed TASeg. Specifically we propose a Temporal LiDAR Aggregation and Distillation (TLAD) algorithm which leverages historical priors to assign different aggregation steps for different classes. It can largely reduce memory and time overhead while achieving higher accuracy. Besides TLAD trains a teacher injected with gt priors to distill the model further boosting the performance. To make full use of temporal images we design a Temporal Image Aggregation and Fusion (TIAF) module which can greatly expand the camera FOV and enhance the present features. Temporal LiDAR points in the camera FOV are used as mediums to transform temporal image features to the present coordinate for temporal multi-modal fusion. Moreover we develop a Static-Moving Switch Augmentation (SMSA) algorithm which utilizes sufficient temporal information to enable objects to switch their motion states freely thus greatly increasing static and moving training samples. Our TASeg ranks 1st on three challenging tracks i.e. SemanticKITTI single-scan track multi-scan track and nuScenes LiDAR segmentation track strongly demonstrating the superiority of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/LittlePey/TASeg.