# TORNADO-Net: mulTiview tOtal vaRiatioN semAntic segmentation with Diamond inceptiOn module

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10544 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10544/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [RPVNet: A Deep and Efficient Range-Point-Voxel Fusion Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12978/) (2021)
- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05367/) (2023)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [Point-to-Voxel Knowledge Distillation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02099/) (2022)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR-based Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05441/) (2021)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [Using a Waffle Iron for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10100/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LESS: Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08064/) (2022)
- [GP-S3Net: Graph-based Panoptic Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08401/) (2021)
- [GFNet: Geometric Flow Network for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02605/) (2022)
- [LIF-Seg: LiDAR and Camera Image Fusion for 3D LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07511/) (2021)
- [Frame Mining: a Free Lunch for Learning Robotic Manipulation from 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07442/) (2022)
- [Meta-RangeSeg: LiDAR Sequence Semantic Segmentation Using Multiple Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13377/) (2022)
- [CPSeg: Cluster-free Panoptic Segmentation of 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01723/) (2021)
- [MemorySeg: Online LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with a Latent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01556/) (2023)
- [SMAC-Seg: LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation via Sparse Multi-directional Attention Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13588/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning on 3D Semantic Segmentation: A Detailed Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02104/) (2024)
- [How to Build a Curb Dataset with LiDAR Data for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03968/) (2021)
- [COLA: COarse LAbel pre-training for 3D semantic segmentation of sparse LiDAR datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06884/) (2022)
- [Teachers in concordance for pseudo-labeling of 3D sequential data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06079/) (2022)
- [FLARES: Fast and Accurate LiDAR Multi-Range Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09274/) (2025)
- [Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation using Multi Scale Sparse Convolution Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01550/) (2022)
- [Multi-to-Single Knowledge Distillation for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14800/) (2023)
- [PANet: LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation with Sparse Instance Proposal and Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15348/) (2023)
- [Attention-Guided Lidar Segmentation and Odometry Using Image-to-Point Cloud Saliency Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14332/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal and Cross-domain Knowledge Transfer for Label-free 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10649/) (2023)
- [Is clustering enough for LiDAR instance segmentation? A state-of-the-art training-free baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13203/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation of point clouds is a key component of scene understanding for robotics and autonomous driving. In this paper, we introduce TORNADO-Net - a neural network for 3D LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation. We incorporate a multi-view (bird-eye and range) projection feature extraction with an encoder-decoder ResNet architecture with a novel diamond context block. Current projection-based methods do not take into account that neighboring points usually belong to the same class. To better utilize this local neighbourhood information and reduce noisy predictions, we introduce a combination of Total Variation, Lovasz-Softmax, and Weighted Cross-Entropy losses. We also take advantage of the fact that the LiDAR data encompasses 360 degrees field of view and uses circular padding. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the SemanticKITTI dataset and also provide thorough quantitative evaluations and ablation results.