MNEW: Multi-domain Neighborhood Embedding and Weighting for Sparse Point Clouds Segmentation

Point clouds have been widely adopted in 3D semantic scene understanding. However, point clouds for typical tasks such as 3D shape segmentation or indoor scenario parsing are much denser than outdoor LiDAR sweeps for the application of autonomous driving perception. Due to the spatial property disparity, many successful methods designed for dense point clouds behave depreciated effectiveness on the sparse data. In this paper, we focus on the semantic segmentation task of sparse outdoor point clouds. We propose a new method called MNEW, including multi-domain neighborhood embedding, and attention weighting based on their geometry distance, feature similarity, and neighborhood sparsity. The network architecture inherits PointNet which directly process point clouds to capture pointwise details and global semantics, and is improved by involving multi-scale local neighborhoods in static geometry domain and dynamic feature space. The distance/similarity attention and sparsity-adapted weighting mechanism of MNEW enable its capability for a wide range of data sparsity distribution. With experiments conducted on virtual and real KITTI semantic datasets, MNEW achieves the top performance for sparse point clouds, which is important to the application of LiDAR-based automated driving perception.