PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation

The requirement of fine-grained perception by autonomous driving systems has resulted in recently increased research in the online semantic segmentation of single-scan LiDAR. Emerging datasets and technological advancements have enabled researchers to benchmark this problem and improve the applicable semantic segmentation algorithms. Still, online semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans in autonomous driving applications remains challenging due to three reasons: (1) the need for near-real-time latency with limited hardware, (2) points are distributed unevenly across space, and (3) an increasing number of more fine-grained semantic classes. The combination of the aforementioned challenges motivates us to propose a…