Temporal Bird’s Eye View for 3D Semantic Segmentation

Due to the growing importance of autonomous robots and vehicles, 3D semantic segmentation, a key task of 3D scene understanding, has become more and more important. Despite its sequential nature in real-time scenarios, 3D semantic segmentation is often approached as single frame problem. However, temporal dependencies and information offer a huge potential to improve the predictions. Therefore, we propose a recurrent temporal architecture for 3D semantic segmentation, which exploits temporal information at the input and feature stage, to maximize the temporal benefits. Aggregated point clouds in bird’s eye view increase the information provided to the backbone and temporally fused feature maps exploit temporal dependencies on feature level. The experiments conducted on a challenging and large-scale outdoor dataset show considerable improvements compared to a single frame baseline. The temporal information improve the results for every individual class.