Small but Mighty: Enhancing 3D Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation with U-Next Framework

We study the problem of semantic segmentation of large-scale 3D point clouds. In recent years, significant research efforts have been directed toward local feature aggregation, improved loss functions and sampling strategies. While the fundamental framework of point cloud semantic segmentation has been largely overlooked, with most existing approaches rely on the U-Net architecture by default. In this paper, we propose U-Next, a small but mighty framework designed for point cloud semantic segmentation. The key to this framework is to learn multi-scale hierarchical representations from semantically similar feature maps. Specifically, we build our U-Next by stacking multiple U-Net $L^1$ codecs in a nested and densely arranged manner to minimize the semantic gap, while simultaneously fusing the feature maps across scales to effectively recover the fine-grained details. We also devised a multi-level deep supervision mechanism to further smooth gradient propagation and facilitate network optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on three large-scale benchmarks including S3DIS, Toronto3D, and SensatUrban demonstrate the superiority and the effectiveness of the proposed U-Next architecture. Our U-Next architecture shows consistent and visible performance improvements across different tasks and baseline models, indicating its great potential to serve as a general framework for future research.