LENet: Lightweight And Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Using Multi-Scale Convolution Attention

LiDAR-based semantic segmentation is critical in the fields of robotics and autonomous driving as it provides a comprehensive understanding of the scene. This paper proposes a lightweight and efficient projection-based semantic segmentation network called LENet with an encoder-decoder structure for LiDAR-based semantic segmentation. The encoder is composed of a novel multi-scale convolutional attention (MSCA) module with varying receptive field sizes to capture features. The decoder employs an Interpolation And Convolution (IAC) mechanism utilizing bilinear interpolation for upsampling multi-resolution feature maps and integrating previous and current dimensional features through a single convolution layer. This approach significantly reduces the network's complexity while also improving its accuracy. Additionally, we introduce multiple auxiliary segmentation heads to further refine the network's accuracy. Extensive evaluations on publicly available datasets, including SemanticKITTI, SemanticPOSS, and nuScenes, show that our proposed method is lighter, more efficient, and robust compared to state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods. Full implementation is available at https://github.com/fengluodb/LENet.