# A Technical Survey and Evaluation of Traditional Point Cloud Clustering Methods for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09522 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09522/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07853/) (2020)
- [Seamless Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01220/) (2019)
- [Cylinder3D: An Effective 3D Framework for Driving-scene LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01550/) (2020)
- [Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14962/) (2021)
- [SuMa++: Efficient LiDAR-based Semantic SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11320/) (2021)
- [LiDAR-based Panoptic Segmentation via Dynamic Shifting Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11964/) (2020)
- [EfficientLPS: Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08009/) (2021)
- [FISHING Net: Future Inference of Semantic Heatmaps In Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09917/) (2020)
- [Panoster: End-to-end Panoptic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15157/) (2020)
- [Point Cloud Oversegmentation with Graph-Structured Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02113/) (2019)
- [A Benchmark for LiDAR-based Panoptic Segmentation based on KITTI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02371/) (2020)
- [Graph Based Over-Segmentation Methods for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04114/) (2017)
- [InsClustering: Instantly Clustering LiDAR Range Measures for Autonomous Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06681/) (2020)
- [PASS3D: Precise and Accelerated Semantic Segmentation for 3D Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01643/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Automated forest inventory: analysis of high-density airborne LiDAR point clouds with 3D deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15084/) (2023)
- [Scalable 3D Panoptic Segmentation As Superpoint Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06704/) (2024)
- [A Divide-and-Merge Point Cloud Clustering Algorithm for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08224/) (2021)
- [A Review of Panoptic Segmentation for Mobile Mapping Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13980/) (2023)
- [Towards accurate instance segmentation in large-scale LiDAR point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02877/) (2023)
- [Lidar Panoptic Segmentation in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14273/) (2024)
- [Is clustering enough for LiDAR instance segmentation? A state-of-the-art training-free baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13203/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Joint Simulation of LiDAR Perception and Motion Planning for Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06966/) (2023)
- [DAGLFNet: Deep Feature Attention Guided Global and Local Feature Fusion for Pseudo-Image Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10471/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Snowflakes: Disentangling Weather Effects from Confounding Meta-Factors in LiDAR Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13891/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LiDAR panoptic segmentation is a newly proposed technical task for autonomous driving. In contrast to popular end-to-end deep learning solutions, we propose a hybrid method with an existing semantic segmentation network to extract semantic information and a traditional LiDAR point cloud cluster algorithm to split each instance object. We argue geometry-based traditional clustering algorithms are worth being considered by showing a state-of-the-art performance among all published end-to-end deep learning solutions on the panoptic segmentation leaderboard of the SemanticKITTI dataset. To our best knowledge, we are the first to attempt the point cloud panoptic segmentation with clustering algorithms. Therefore, instead of working on new models, we give a comprehensive technical survey in this paper by implementing four typical cluster methods and report their performances on the benchmark. Those four cluster methods are the most representative ones with real-time running speed. They are implemented with C++ in this paper and then wrapped as a python function for seamless integration with the existing deep learning frameworks. We release our code for peer researchers who might be interested in this problem.