Image Generation for Automotive Lidar Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a new method for the zero-shot open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) of 3D automotive lidar data. To circumvent the recognized image-text modality gap that is intrinsic to approaches based on Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP, our method relies instead on image generation from text, to create prototype images. Given a 3D network distilled from a 2D Vision Foundation Model (VFM), we then label a point cloud by matching 3D point features with 2D image features of these prototypes. Our method is state-of-the-art for OVSS on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI.