SPORTS: Simultaneous Panoptic Odometry, Rendering, Tracking and Segmentation for Urban Scenes Understanding

The scene perception, understanding, and simulation are fundamental techniques for embodied-AI agents, while existing solutions are still prone to segmentation deficiency, dynamic objects' interference, sensor data sparsity, and view-limitation problems. This paper proposes a novel framework, named SPORTS, for holistic scene understanding via tightly integrating Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), Visual Odometry (VO), and Scene Rendering (SR) tasks into an iterative and unified perspective. Firstly, VPS designs an adaptive attention-based geometric fusion mechanism to align cross-frame features via enrolling the pose, depth, and optical flow modality, which automatically adjust feature maps for different decoding stages. And a post-matching strategy is integrated to improve identities tracking. In VO, panoptic segmentation results from VPS are combined with the optical flow map to improve the confidence estimation of dynamic objects, which enhances the accuracy of the camera pose estimation and completeness of the depth map generation via the learning-based paradigm. Furthermore, the point-based rendering of SR is beneficial from VO, transforming sparse point clouds into neural fields to synthesize high-fidelity RGB views and twin panoptic views. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our attention-based feature fusion outperforms most existing state-of-the-art methods on the odometry, tracking, segmentation, and novel view synthesis tasks.

LISNeRF Mapping: LiDAR-based Implicit Mapping via Semantic Neural Fields for Large-Scale 3D Scenes

Large-scale semantic mapping is crucial for outdoor autonomous agents to fulfill high-level tasks such as planning and navigation. This paper proposes a novel method for large-scale 3D semantic reconstruction through implicit representations from LiDAR measurements alone. We firstly leverages an octree-based and hierarchical structure to store implicit features, then these implicit features are decoded to semantic information and signed distance value through shallow Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). We adopt off-the-shelf algorithms to predict the semantic labels and instance IDs of point cloud. Then we jointly optimize the implicit features and MLPs parameters with self-supervision paradigm for point cloud geometry and pseudo-supervision pradigm for semantic and panoptic labels. Subsequently, Marching Cubes algorithm is exploited to subdivide and visualize the scenes in the inferring stage. For scenarios with memory constraints, a map stitching strategy is also developed to merge sub-maps into a complete map. As far as we know, our method is the first work to reconstruct semantic implicit scenes from LiDAR-only input. Experiments on three real-world datasets, SemanticKITTI, SemanticPOSS and nuScenes, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework compared to current state-of-the-art 3D mapping methods.