RangeSAM: Leveraging Visual Foundation Models for Range-View repesented LiDAR segmentation

Point cloud segmentation is central to autonomous driving and 3D scene understanding. While voxel- and point-based methods dominate recent research due to their compatibility with deep architectures and ability to capture fine-grained geometry, they often incur high computational cost, irregular memory access, and limited real-time efficiency. In contrast, range-view methods, though relatively underexplored - can leverage mature 2D semantic segmentation techniques for fast and accurate predictions. Motivated by the rapid progress in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) for captioning, zero-shot recognition, and multimodal tasks, we investigate whether SAM2, the current state-of-the-art VFM for segmentation tasks, can serve as a strong backbone for LiDAR point cloud segmentation in the range view. We present , to our knowledge, the first range-view framework that adapts SAM2 to 3D segmentation, coupling efficient 2D feature extraction with standard projection/back-projection to operate on point clouds. To optimize SAM2 for range-view representations, we implement several architectural modifications to the encoder: (1) a novel module that emphasizes horizontal spatial dependencies inherent in LiDAR range images, (2) a customized configuration of tailored to the geometric properties of spherical projections, and (3) an adapted mechanism in the encoder backbone specifically designed to capture the unique spatial patterns and discontinuities present in range-view pseudo-images. Our approach achieves competitive performance on SemanticKITTI while benefiting from the speed, scalability, and deployment simplicity of 2D-centric pipelines. This work highlights the viability of VFMs as general-purpose backbones for 3D perception and opens a path toward unified, foundation-model-driven LiDAR segmentation. Results lets us conclude that range-view segmentation methods using VFMs leads to promising results.

SpectralGaussians: Semantic, spectral 3D Gaussian splatting for multi-spectral scene representation, visualization and analysis

We propose a novel cross-spectral rendering framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that generates realistic and semantically meaningful splats from registered multi-view spectrum and segmentation maps. This extension enhances the representation of scenes with multiple spectra, providing insights into the underlying materials and segmentation. We introduce an improved physically-based rendering approach for Gaussian splats, estimating reflectance and lights per spectra, thereby enhancing accuracy and realism. In a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach with respect to other recent learning-based spectral scene representation approaches (i.e., XNeRF and SpectralNeRF) as well as other non-spectral state-of-the-art learning-based approaches. Our work also demonstrates the potential of spectral scene understanding for precise scene editing techniques like style transfer, inpainting, and removal. Thereby, our contributions address challenges in multi-spectral scene representation, rendering, and editing, offering new possibilities for diverse applications.