# Feasibility of Indoor Frame-Wise Lidar Semantic Segmentation via Distillation from Visual Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18831/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (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)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Image-to-Lidar Self-Supervised Distillation for Autonomous Driving Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16258/) (2022)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17504/) (2023)
- [DINO in the Room: Leveraging 2D Foundation Models for 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18944/) (2025)
- [NTU VIRAL: A Visual-Inertial-Ranging-Lidar Dataset, From an Aerial Vehicle Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00379/) (2022)
- [S-Graphs+: Real-time Localization and Mapping leveraging Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11770/) (2022)
- [M2DGR: A Multi-sensor and Multi-scenario SLAM Dataset for Ground Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13659/) (2021)
- [Multi-Space Alignments Towards Universal LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01538/) (2024)
- [PointDC:Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds via Cross-modal Distillation and Super-Voxel Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08965/) (2023)
- [M3Net: Multimodal Multi-task Learning for 3D Detection, Segmentation, and Occupancy Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18100/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Lidar Dataset for Benchmarking General-Purpose Localization and Mapping Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03454/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Semantic-ITC: A Frame-wise Indoor Mobile Laser Scanning Dataset and Benchmark for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18493/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frame-wise semantic segmentation of indoor lidar scans is a fundamental step toward higher-level 3D scene understanding and mapping applications. However, acquiring frame-wise ground truth for training deep learning models is costly and time-consuming. This challenge is largely addressed, for imagery, by Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) which segment image frames. The same VFMs may be used to train a lidar scan frame segmentation model via a 2D-to-3D distillation pipeline. The success of such distillation has been shown for autonomous driving scenes, but not yet for indoor scenes. Here, we study the feasibility of repeating this success for indoor scenes, in a frame-wise distillation manner by coupling each lidar scan with a VFM-processed camera image. The evaluation is done using indoor SLAM datasets, where pseudo-labels are used for downstream evaluation. Also, a small manually annotated lidar dataset is provided for validation, as there are no other lidar frame-wise indoor datasets with semantics. Results show that the distilled model achieves up to 56% mIoU under pseudo-label evaluation and around 36% mIoU with real-label, demonstrating the feasibility of cross-modal distillation for indoor lidar semantic segmentation without manual annotations.