# GIPSO: Geometrically Informed Propagation for Online Adaptation in 3D LiDAR Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09763/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04779/) (2016)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [Bayesian SegNet: Model Uncertainty in Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architectures for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02680/) (2015)
- [A survey of loss functions for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14822/) (2020)
- [Spatio-temporal Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00179/) (2021)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [The Perfect Match: 3D Point Cloud Matching with Smoothed Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06879/) (2018)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [PolarMix: A General Data Augmentation Technique for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00223/) (2022)
- [In Search of Lost Online Test-time Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20199/) (2023)
- [4D Contrastive Superflows are Dense 3D Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06190/) (2024)
- [Domain generalization of 3D semantic segmentation in autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04245/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [Compositional Semantic Mix for Domain Adaptation in Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14619/) (2023)
- [LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04004/) (2025)
- [Instant Domain Augmentation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14378/) (2023)
- [Walking Your LiDOG: A Journey Through Multiple Domains for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11705/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal and Uncertainty-Aware Agglomeration for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16707/) (2025)
- [360^circ from a Single Camera: A Few-Shot Approach for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06197/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)
- [COLA: COarse-LAbel multi-source LiDAR semantic segmentation for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03017/) (2023)
- [Beyond One Shot, Beyond One Perspective: Cross-View and Long-Horizon Distillation for Better LiDAR Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05260/) (2025)
- [HGL: Hierarchical Geometry Learning for Test-time Adaptation in 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12387/) (2024)
- [Train Till You Drop: Towards Stable and Robust Source-free Unsupervised 3D Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04409/) (2024)
- [TTT-KD: Test-Time Training for 3D Semantic Segmentation through Knowledge Distillation from Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11691/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal & Cross-domain Learning for Unsupervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02883/) (2023)
- [Novel class discovery meets foundation models for 3D semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03782/) (2023)
- [Text3DAug -- Prompted Instance Augmentation for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14253/) (2024)
- [Distilling 3D distinctive local descriptors for 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15106/) (2025)
- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [APCoTTA: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09971/) (2025)
- [Improving Multimodal Distillation for 3D Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17455/) (2025)
- [Calibrating Panoramic Depth Estimation for Practical Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14005/) (2023)
- [Interactive Test-Time Adaptation with Reliable Spatial-Temporal Voxels for Multi-Modal Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06461/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is fundamental for autonomous driving. Most approaches in the literature neglect an important aspect, i.e., how to deal with domain shift when handling dynamic scenes. This can significantly hinder the navigation capabilities of self-driving vehicles. This paper advances the state of the art in this research field. Our first contribution consists in analysing a new unexplored scenario in point cloud segmentation, namely Source-Free Online Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SF-OUDA). We experimentally show that state-of-the-art methods have a rather limited ability to adapt pre-trained deep network models to unseen domains in an online manner. Our second contribution is an approach that relies on adaptive self-training and geometric-feature propagation to adapt a pre-trained source model online without requiring either source data or target labels. Our third contribution is to study SF-OUDA in a challenging setup where source data is synthetic and target data is point clouds captured in the real world. We use the recent SynLiDAR dataset as a synthetic source and introduce two new synthetic (source) datasets, which can stimulate future synthetic-to-real autonomous driving research. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our segmentation approach on thousands of real-world point clouds. Code and synthetic datasets are available at https://github.com/saltoricristiano/gipso-sfouda.