Multilateral Cascading Network for Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Outdoor Point Clouds

Semantic segmentation of large-scale outdoor point clouds is of significant importance in environment perception and scene understanding. However, this task continues to present a significant research challenge, due to the inherent complexity of outdoor objects and their diverse distributions in real-world environments. In this study, we propose the multilateral cascading network (MCNet) designed to address this challenge. The model comprises two key components: a multilateral cascading attention enhancement (MCAE) module, which facilitates the learning of complex local features through multilateral cascading operations; and a point cross-stage partial (P-CSP) module, which fuses global and local features, thereby optimizing the integration of valuable feature information across multiple scales. Our proposed method demonstrates superior performance relative to state-of-the-art approaches across two widely recognized benchmark datasets: Toronto3D and SensatUrban. Especially on the city-scale SensatUrban dataset, our results surpassed the current best result by 2.1% in overall mean intersection over union (mIoU) and yielded an improvement of 15.9% on average for small-sample object categories comprising less than 2% of the total samples, in comparison to the baseline method. Our code is available at https://github.com/ranhaogong/MCNet.