# Learning Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds with Random Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.02389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [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)
- [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)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [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)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (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)
- [SO-Net: Self-Organizing Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04249/) (2018)
- [SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07563/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Not All Points Are Equal: Learning Highly Efficient Point-based Detectors for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11139/) (2022)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Detection in 3D Point Clouds using Deep Geometric Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11660/) (2022)
- [CAD-SIGNet: CAD Language Inference from Point Clouds using Layer-wise Sketch Instance Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17678/) (2024)
- [STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09065/) (2022)
- [Sparse-to-dense Feature Matching: Intra and Inter domain Cross-modal Learning in Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14724/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking and Improving Bird's Eye View Perception Robustness in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17426/) (2024)
- [Vote2Cap-DETR++: Decoupling Localization and Describing for End-to-End 3D Dense Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02999/) (2023)
- [Imperceptible Transfer Attack and Defense on 3D Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10990/) (2021)
- [Open-world Semantic Segmentation for LIDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01452/) (2022)
- [Is Your LiDAR Placement Optimized for 3D Scene Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17009/) (2024)
- [Efficient 3D Deep LiDAR Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02135/) (2021)
- [No Pain, Big Gain: Classify Dynamic Point Cloud Sequences with Static Models by Fitting Feature-level Space-time Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11113/) (2022)
- [Isometric 3D Adversarial Examples in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15291/) (2022)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09783/) (2021)
- [3DAC: Learning Attribute Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09931/) (2022)
- [PointCMP: Contrastive Mask Prediction for Self-supervised Learning on Point Cloud Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04075/) (2023)
- [Flattening-Net: Deep Regular 2D Representation for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08892/) (2022)
- [Visual Semantic Segmentation Based on Few/Zero-Shot Learning: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08352/) (2022)
- [Point Contrastive Prediction with Semantic Clustering for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Cloud Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09247/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Dependency for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04761/) (2022)
- [3D Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with 2D-3D Vision-Language Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02402/) (2024)
- [LargeAD: Large-Scale Cross-Sensor Data Pretraining for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04005/) (2025)
- [Annotator: A Generic Active Learning Baseline for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20293/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning via Separating Mixed Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00452/) (2021)
- [LogoSP: Local-global Grouping of Superpoints for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07857/) (2025)
- [PointVST: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Point Clouds via View-Specific Point-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14197/) (2022)
- [Meta-Sampler: Almost-Universal yet Task-Oriented Sampling for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16001/) (2022)
- [CMDFusion: Bidirectional Fusion Network with Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation for LIDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04091/) (2023)
- [Spherical Frustum Sparse Convolution Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17491/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Comparative experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass up to 200x faster than existing approaches. Moreover, extensive experiments on five large-scale point cloud datasets, including Semantic3D, SemanticKITTI, Toronto3D, NPM3D and S3DIS, demonstrate the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance of our RandLA-Net.