# KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 40 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10133/) (2021)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00448/) (2015)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Simple-BEV: What Really Matters for Multi-Sensor BEV Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07959/) (2022)
- [Balanced MSE for Imbalanced Visual Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16427/) (2022)
- [MonoDistill: Learning Spatial Features for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10830/) (2022)
- [FusionAD: Multi-modality Fusion for Prediction and Planning Tasks of Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01006/) (2023)
- [BEVDistill: Cross-Modal BEV Distillation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09386/) (2022)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Panoptic Segmentation Using Monocular Frontal View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03227/) (2021)
- [UniDistill: A Universal Cross-Modality Knowledge Distillation Framework for 3D Object Detection in Bird's-Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15083/) (2023)
- [DistillBEV: Boosting Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection with Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15109/) (2023)
- [CRKD: Enhanced Camera-Radar Object Detection with Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19104/) (2024)
- [SIMPL: A Simple and Efficient Multi-agent Motion Prediction Baseline for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02519/) (2024)
- [MapDistill: Boosting Efficient Camera-based HD Map Construction via Camera-LiDAR Fusion Model Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11682/) (2024)
- [UniFusion: Unified Multi-view Fusion Transformer for Spatial-Temporal Representation in Bird's-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08536/) (2022)

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

- [Panoramic Multimodal Semantic Occupancy Prediction for Quadruped Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13108/) (2026)
- [O3N: Omnidirectional Open-Vocabulary Occupancy Prediction for Embodied Intelligent Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12144/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first cross-modality distillation framework specifically tailored for single-panoramic-camera Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) segmentation. Our approach leverages a novel LiDAR image representation fused from range, intensity and ambient channels, together with a voxel-aligned view transformer that preserves spatial fidelity while enabling efficient BEV processing. During training, a high-capacity LiDAR and camera fusion Teacher network extracts both rich spatial and semantic features for cross-modality knowledge distillation into a lightweight Student network that relies solely on a single 360-degree panoramic camera image. Extensive experiments on the Dur360BEV dataset demonstrate that our teacher model significantly outperforms existing camera-based BEV segmentation methods, achieving a 25.6% IoU improvement. Meanwhile, the distilled Student network attains competitive performance with an 8.5% IoU gain and state-of-the-art inference speed of 31.2 FPS. Moreover, evaluations on KITTI-360 (two fisheye cameras) confirm that our distillation framework generalises to diverse camera setups, underscoring its feasibility and robustness. This approach reduces sensor complexity and deployment costs while providing a practical solution for efficient, low-cost BEV segmentation in real-world autonomous driving.