# 3D-MiniNet: Learning a 2D Representation from Point Clouds for Fast and Efficient 3D LIDAR Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10893 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10893/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [2DPASS: 2D Priors Assisted Semantic Segmentation on LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04397/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05367/) (2023)
- [Spherical Transformer for LiDAR-based 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12766/) (2023)
- [Scribble-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08537/) (2022)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR-based Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05441/) (2021)
- [CoSMix: Compositional Semantic Mix for Domain Adaptation in 3D LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09778/) (2022)
- [FRNet: Frustum-Range Networks for Scalable LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04484/) (2023)
- [FIDNet: LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Fully Interpolation Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03787/) (2021)
- [ConDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Segmentation via Regularized Domain Concatenation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15242/) (2021)
- [LESS: Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08064/) (2022)
- [Lite-HDSeg: LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Using Lite Harmonic Dense Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08852/) (2021)
- [GFNet: Geometric Flow Network for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02605/) (2022)
- [Less is More: Reducing Task and Model Complexity for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11203/) (2023)
- [LiDAR-based Recurrent 3D Semantic Segmentation with Temporal Memory Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02263/) (2021)
- [Efficient 3D Deep LiDAR Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02135/) (2021)
- [Advancements in Point Cloud Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12113/) (2023)
- [Meta-RangeSeg: LiDAR Sequence Semantic Segmentation Using Multiple Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13377/) (2022)
- [Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14605/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervision and Gated Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09783/) (2021)
- [Novel Class Discovery for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11610/) (2023)
- [Compositional Semantic Mix for Domain Adaptation in Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14619/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00970/) (2023)
- [Position-Guided Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13509/) (2023)
- [PVNAS: 3D Neural Architecture Search with Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11797/) (2022)
- [Gait Recognition in Large-scale Free Environment via Single LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12371/) (2022)
- [LiMoSeg: Real-time Bird's Eye View based LiDAR Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04875/) (2021)
- [FPS-Net: A Convolutional Fusion Network for Large-Scale LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00738/) (2021)
- [Walking Your LiDOG: A Journey Through Multiple Domains for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11705/) (2023)
- [3D Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with 2D-3D Vision-Language Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02402/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LIDAR semantic segmentation, which assigns a semantic label to each 3D point measured by the LIDAR, is becoming an essential task for many robotic applications such as autonomous driving. Fast and efficient semantic segmentation methods are needed to match the strong computational and temporal restrictions of many of these real-world applications. This work presents 3D-MiniNet, a novel approach for LIDAR semantic segmentation that combines 3D and 2D learning layers. It first learns a 2D representation from the raw points through a novel projection which extracts local and global information from the 3D data. This representation is fed to an efficient 2D Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) that produces a 2D semantic segmentation. These 2D semantic labels are re-projected back to the 3D space and enhanced through a post-processing module. The main novelty in our strategy relies on the projection learning module. Our detailed ablation study shows how each component contributes to the final performance of 3D-MiniNet. We validate our approach on well known public benchmarks (SemanticKITTI and KITTI), where 3D-MiniNet gets state-of-the-art results while being faster and more parameter-efficient than previous methods.