# Lite-HDSeg: LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Using Lite Harmonic Dense Convolutions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [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)
- [SqueezeSegV2: Improved Model Structure and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Road-Object Segmentation from a LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08495/) (2018)
- [SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07563/) (2017)
- [SqueezeSegV3: Spatially-Adaptive Convolution for Efficient Point-Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01803/) (2020)
- [Cylinder3D: An Effective 3D Framework for Driving-scene LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01550/) (2020)
- [ScanComplete: Large-Scale Scene Completion and Semantic Segmentation for 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.10215/) (2017)
- [HarDNet: A Low Memory Traffic Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00948/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Point-Edge Interaction Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10469/) (2019)
- [3D-MiniNet: Learning a 2D Representation from Point Clouds for Fast and Efficient 3D LIDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10893/) (2020)
- [SalsaNet: Fast Road and Vehicle Segmentation in LiDAR Point Clouds for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08291/) (2019)
- [KPRNet: Improving projection-based LiDAR semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12668/) (2020)
- [LatticeNet: Fast Point Cloud Segmentation Using Permutohedral Lattices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05905/) (2019)
- [Boundary Loss for Remote Sensing Imagery Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07852/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [RangeViT: Towards Vision Transformers for 3D Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10222/) (2023)
- [CENet: Toward Concise and Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12691/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Better Call SAL: Towards Learning to Segment Anything in Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13129/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Meta-RangeSeg: LiDAR Sequence Semantic Segmentation Using Multiple Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13377/) (2022)
- [LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04004/) (2025)
- [CPGNet: Cascade Point-Grid Fusion Network for Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09914/) (2022)
- [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)
- [PCSCNet: Fast 3D Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Cloud for Autonomous Car using Point Convolution and Sparse Convolution Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10047/) (2022)
- [4DenoiseNet: Adverse Weather Denoising from Adjacent Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07121/) (2022)
- [TFNet: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Fast and Accurate LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07849/) (2023)
- [SFPNet: Sparse Focal Point Network for Semantic Segmentation on General LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11569/) (2024)
- [3EED: Ground Everything Everywhere in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01755/) (2025)
- [SMAC-Seg: LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation via Sparse Multi-directional Attention Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13588/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Deep Learning Representations of Point Clouds for Real-Time In-Vehicle LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14612/) (2022)
- [Lidar Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking without Bells and Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12464/) (2023)
- [Spherical Frustum Sparse Convolution Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17491/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot 4D Lidar Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00848/) (2025)
- [Filling Missing Values Matters for Range Image-Based Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10175/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Local Features and Range Images for Small Data Real-Time Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10510/) (2024)
- [PCB-RandNet: Rethinking Random Sampling for LIDAR Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13797/) (2022)
- [FLARES: Fast and Accurate LiDAR Multi-Range Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09274/) (2025)
- [Sensor Equivariance by LiDAR Projection Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00221/) (2023)
- [TransUPR: A Transformer-based Uncertain Point Refiner for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08594/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving vehicles and robotic systems rely on accurate perception of their surroundings. Scene understanding is one of the crucial components of perception modules. Among all available sensors, LiDARs are one of the essential sensing modalities of autonomous driving systems due to their active sensing nature with high resolution of sensor readings. Accurate and fast semantic segmentation methods are needed to fully utilize LiDAR sensors for scene understanding. In this paper, we present Lite-HDSeg, a novel real-time convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation of full 3D LiDAR point clouds. Lite-HDSeg can achieve the best accuracy vs. computational complexity trade-off in SemanticKitti benchmark and is designed on the basis of a new encoder-decoder architecture with light-weight harmonic dense convolutions as its core. Moreover, we introduce ICM, an improved global contextual module to capture multi-scale contextual features, and MCSPN, a multi-class Spatial Propagation Network to further refine the semantic boundaries. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches which can run real-time, thus is suitable for robotic and autonomous driving applications.