Meet Seal: An AI Framework that Pursues ‘Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences’ by Leveraging 2D Vision Foundation Models for Self-Supervised Learning on Large-Scale 3D Point Clouds

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the Artificial Intelligence community by storm. Their recent impact and incredible performance display have helped contribute to a wide range of industries such as healthcare, finance, entertainment, etc. The well-known LLMs like GPT-3.5, GPT 4, DALLE 2, and BERT, also known as the foundation models, perform extraordinary tasks and ease our lives by generating unique content given just a short natural language prompt. 

Recent vision foundation models (VFMs) like SAM, X-Decoder, and SEEM have made many advancements in computer vision. Although VFMs have made tremendous progress in 2D perception tasks, 3D VFM research still needs to be improved. Researchers have suggested that expanding current 2D VFMs for 3D perception tasks is required. One crucial 3D perception task is the segmentation of point clouds captured by LiDAR sensors, which is essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles.

Existing point cloud segmentation techniques mainly rely on sizable datasets that have been annotated for training; however, labeling point clouds is time-consuming and difficult. To overcome all the challenges, a team of researchers has introduced Seal, a framework that uses vision foundation models for segmenting diverse automotive point cloud sequences. Inspired by cross-modal representation learning, Seal gathers semantically rich knowledge from VFMs to support self-supervised representation learning on automotive point clouds. The main idea is to develop high-quality contrastive samples for cross-modal representation learning using a 2D-3D relationship between LiDAR and camera sensors.

Seal possesses three key properties: scalability, consistency, and generalizability.

1. Scalability – Seal makes use of VFMs by simply converting them into point clouds, doing away with the necessity for 2D or 3D annotations during the pretraining phase. Due to its scalability, it manages vast amounts of data, which even helps eliminates the time-consuming need for human annotation.

2. Consistency: The architecture enforces spatial and temporal links at both the camera-to-LiDAR and point-to-segment stages. Seal enables efficient cross-modal representation learning by capturing the cross-modal interactions between vision, i.e., camera and LiDAR sensors which help in making sure that the learned representations incorporate pertinent and coherent data from both modalities.

3. Generalizability: Seal enables knowledge transfer to downstream applications involving various point cloud datasets. It generalizes and handles datasets with different resolutions, sizes, degrees of cleanliness, contamination levels, actual data, and artificial data.

Some of the key contributions mentioned by the team are –

1. The proposed framework Seal is a scalable, reliable, and generalizable framework created to capture semantic-aware spatial and temporal consistency.

2. It allows the extraction of useful features from automobile point cloud sequences.

3. The authors have stated that this study is the first to use 2D vision foundation models for self-supervised representation learning on a significant scale of 3D point clouds.

4. Across 11 different point cloud datasets with various data configurations, SEAL has performed better than earlier methods in both linear probing and fine-tuning for downstream applications.

For evaluation, the team has performed tests on eleven distinct point cloud datasets to assess Seal’s performance. The outcomes demonstrated Seal’s superiority to the existing approaches. On the nuScenes dataset, Seal achieved a remarkable mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 45.0% after linear probing. This performance surpassed random initialization by 36.9% mIoU and outperformed previous SOTA methods by 6.1% mIoU. Seal also portrayed significant performance gains in twenty different few-shot fine-tuning tasks across all eleven tested point cloud datasets.

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