# EfficientLPS: Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08009 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08009/

## Key facts

- Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [SqueezeSeg: Convolutional Neural Nets with Recurrent CRF for Real-Time Road-Object Segmentation from 3D LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07368/) (2017)
- [SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08588/) (2017)
- [Learning Object Bounding Boxes for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01140/) (2019)
- [GSPN: Generative Shape Proposal Network for 3D Instance Segmentation in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03320/) (2018)
- [Seamless Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01220/) (2019)
- [EfficientPS: Efficient Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02307/) (2020)
- [Searching for Efficient Multi-Scale Architectures for Dense Image Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04184/) (2018)
- [SESS: Self-Ensembling Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11803/) (2019)
- [3DIoUMatch: Leveraging IoU Prediction for Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04355/) (2020)
- [SSAP: Single-Shot Instance Segmentation With Affinity Pyramid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01616/) (2019)
- [Depth-aware CNN for RGB-D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06791/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Model Adaptation for Multimodal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03833/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Panoptic Lifting for 3D Scene Understanding with Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09802/) (2022)
- [Panoptic nuScenes: A Large-Scale Benchmark for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03805/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Range View Representation for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05367/) (2023)
- [PanoOcc: Unified Occupancy Representation for Camera-based 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10013/) (2023)
- [LidarMultiNet: Towards a Unified Multi-Task Network for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09385/) (2022)
- [Panoptic-PHNet: Towards Real-Time and High-Precision LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation via Clustering Pseudo Heatmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07002/) (2022)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Deep Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02377/) (2021)
- [Better Call SAL: Towards Learning to Segment Anything in Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13129/) (2024)
- [PaSCo: Urban 3D Panoptic Scene Completion with Uncertainty Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02158/) (2023)
- [Amodal Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11542/) (2022)
- [GP-S3Net: Graph-based Panoptic Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08401/) (2021)
- [Rethinking End-to-End 2D to 3D Scene Segmentation in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14029/) (2025)
- [Multi-Space Alignments Towards Universal LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01538/) (2024)
- [Mask4Former: Mask Transformer for 4D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16133/) (2023)
- [Sparse Cross-scale Attention Network for Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05972/) (2022)
- [Perceiving the Invisible: Proposal-Free Amodal Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14637/) (2022)
- [PanSt3R: Multi-view Consistent Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21348/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15286/) (2021)
- [4D Panoptic Segmentation as Invariant and Equivariant Field Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15651/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Segmentation: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10250/) (2021)
- [LiDAR-Camera Panoptic Segmentation via Geometry-Consistent and Semantic-Aware Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01686/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-aware Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14554/) (2022)
- [Position-Guided Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13509/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Vision-Language Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05448/) (2023)
- [N2M2: Learning Navigation for Arbitrary Mobile Manipulation Motions in Unseen and Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08737/) (2022)
- [PUPS: Point Cloud Unified Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06185/) (2023)
- [PCF-Lift: Panoptic Lifting by Probabilistic Contrastive Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10659/) (2024)
- [MaskRange: A Mask-classification Model for Range-view based LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12073/) (2022)
- [CPSeg: Cluster-free Panoptic Segmentation of 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01723/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoptic segmentation of point clouds is a crucial task that enables autonomous vehicles to comprehend their vicinity using their highly accurate and reliable LiDAR sensors. Existing top-down approaches tackle this problem by either combining independent task-specific networks or translating methods from the image domain ignoring the intricacies of LiDAR data and thus often resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we present the novel top-down Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation (EfficientLPS) architecture that addresses multiple challenges in segmenting LiDAR point clouds including distance-dependent sparsity, severe occlusions, large scale-variations, and re-projection errors. EfficientLPS comprises of a novel shared backbone that encodes with strengthened geometric transformation modeling capacity and aggregates semantically rich range-aware multi-scale features. It incorporates new scale-invariant semantic and instance segmentation heads along with the panoptic fusion module which is supervised by our proposed panoptic periphery loss function. Additionally, we formulate a regularized pseudo labeling framework to further improve the performance of EfficientLPS by training on unlabelled data. We benchmark our proposed model on two large-scale LiDAR datasets: nuScenes, for which we also provide ground truth annotations, and SemanticKITTI. Notably, EfficientLPS sets the new state-of-the-art on both these datasets.