# Exploiting Local Features and Range Images for Small Data Real-Time Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Source: [Exploiting Local Features and Range Images for Small Data Real-Time Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa75311e209131cea6645f>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:10.237Z

Authors: Daniel Fusaro, Simone Mosco, Emanuele Menegatti, Alberto Pretto

Published: 2024-10-14T13:49:05.000Z

## Abstract

Semantic segmentation of point clouds is an essential task for understanding the environment in autonomous driving and robotics. Recent range-based works achieve real-time efficiency, while point- and voxel-based methods produce better results but are affected by high computational complexity. Moreover, highly complex deep learning models are often not suited to efficiently learn from small datasets. Their generalization capabilities can easily be driven by the abundance of data rather than the architecture design. In this paper, we harness the information from the three-dimensional representation to proficiently capture local features, while introducing the range image representation to incorporate additional information and facilitate fast computation. A GPU-based KDTree allows for rapid building, querying, and enhancing projection with straightforward operations. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate the benefits of our modification in a \`\`small data'' setup, in which only one sequence of the dataset is used to train the models, but also in the conventional setup, where all sequences except one are used for training. We show that a reduced version of our model not only demonstrates strong competitiveness against full-scale state-of-the-art models but also operates in real-time, making it a viable choice for real-world case applications. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/Bender97/WaffleAndRange.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10510>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10510.pdf>)
