# EPMF: Efficient Perception-aware Multi-sensor Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Two-Stream Network Fusion for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06573/) (2016)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [RangeViT: Towards Vision Transformers for 3D Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10222/) (2023)
- [MSeg3D: Multi-modal 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08600/) (2023)
- [SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04383/) (2024)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance from 2D Interactions in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10437/) (2023)
- [DFormer: Rethinking RGBD Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09668/) (2023)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [SDSTrack: Self-Distillation Symmetric Adapter Learning for Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16002/) (2024)
- [GeminiFusion: Efficient Pixel-wise Multimodal Fusion for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01210/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for High-Performance, Training-Free Open Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09219/) (2024)
- [GrowSP: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16404/) (2023)
- [HRFuser: A Multi-resolution Sensor Fusion Architecture for 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15157/) (2022)
- [Learning Modality-agnostic Representation for Semantic Segmentation from Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11351/) (2024)
- [DINO in the Room: Leveraging 2D Foundation Models for 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18944/) (2025)
- [Meta-RangeSeg: LiDAR Sequence Semantic Segmentation Using Multiple Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13377/) (2022)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [See More and Know More: Zero-shot Point Cloud Segmentation via Multi-modal Visual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10782/) (2023)
- [LiDAR-Camera Panoptic Segmentation via Geometry-Consistent and Semantic-Aware Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01686/) (2023)
- [Synchronize Feature Extracting and Matching: A Single Branch Framework for 3D Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12549/) (2023)
- [HENet: Hybrid Encoding for End-to-end Multi-task 3D Perception from Multi-view Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02517/) (2024)
- [Image Understands Point Cloud: Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation via Association Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07774/) (2022)
- [RAPiD-Seg: Range-Aware Pointwise Distance Distribution Networks for 3D LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10159/) (2024)
- [SFPNet: Sparse Focal Point Network for Semantic Segmentation on General LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11569/) (2024)
- [CPCM: Contextual Point Cloud Modeling for Weakly-supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10316/) (2023)
- [4D-Former: Multimodal 4D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01520/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.