Panoptic segmentation is the combination of semantic and instance segmentation: assign the points in a 3D point cloud to semantic categories and partition them into distinct object instances. It has many obvious applications for outdoor scene understanding, from city mapping to forest management. Existing methods struggle to segment nearby instances of the same semantic category, like adjacent pieces of street furniture or neighbouring trees, which limits their usability for inventory- or management-type applications that rely on object instances. This study explores the steps of the panoptic segmentation pipeline concerned with clustering points into object instances, with the goal to alleviate that bottleneck. We find that a carefully designed clustering strategy, which leverages multiple types of learned point embeddings, significantly improves instance segmentation. Experiments on the NPM3D urban mobile mapping dataset and the FOR-instance forest dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed strategy.

研究通过聚类策略和点嵌入来改进全景分割的实例分割步骤，以解决同一个语义类别附近实例分割的挑战，实验证明该策略的有效性和多样性。

大规模LiDAR点云中精确实例分割的研究