# SemRaFiner: Panoptic Segmentation in Sparse and Noisy Radar Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [Mask3D: Mask Transformer for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03105/) (2022)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [SoftGroup for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01509/) (2022)
- [RPVNet: A Deep and Efficient Range-Point-Voxel Fusion Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12978/) (2021)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (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)
- [Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14962/) (2021)
- [Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07478/) (2021)
- [EfficientLPS: Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08009/) (2021)
- [Moving Object Segmentation in 3D LiDAR Data: A Learning-based Approach Exploiting Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08971/) (2021)
- [RadarScenes: A Real-World Radar Point Cloud Data Set for Automotive Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02493/) (2021)
- [Panoptic-PHNet: Towards Real-Time and High-Precision LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation via Clustering Pseudo Heatmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07002/) (2022)
- [Dynamic 3D Scene Analysis by Point Cloud Accumulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12394/) (2022)
- [Panoster: End-to-end Panoptic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15157/) (2020)
- [A Benchmark for LiDAR-based Panoptic Segmentation based on KITTI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02371/) (2020)
- [GFNet: Geometric Flow Network for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02605/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Redefining Radar Segmentation: Simultaneous Static-Moving Segmentation and Ego-Motion Estimation using Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20003/) (2025)
- [DeeperRadar: End-to-End MIMO Radar Design and Multi-Modal Fusion for Autonomous Vehicle Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17351/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic scene understanding, including the perception and classification of moving agents, is essential to enabling safe and robust driving behaviours of autonomous vehicles. Cameras and LiDARs are commonly used for semantic scene understanding. However, both sensor modalities face limitations in adverse weather and usually do not provide motion information. Radar sensors overcome these limitations and directly offer information about moving agents by measuring the Doppler velocity, but the measurements are comparably sparse and noisy. In this paper, we address the problem of panoptic segmentation in sparse radar point clouds to enhance scene understanding. Our approach, called SemRaFiner, accounts for changing density in sparse radar point clouds and optimizes the feature extraction to improve accuracy. Furthermore, we propose an optimized training procedure to refine instance assignments by incorporating a dedicated data augmentation. Our experiments suggest that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for radar-based panoptic segmentation.