Panoptic segmentation is a computer vision task that combines semantic segmentation and instance segmentation to provide a comprehensive understanding of the scene. The goal of panoptic segmentation is to segment the image into semantically meaningful parts or regions, while also detecting and distinguishing individual instances of objects within those regions. In a given image, every pixel is assigned a semantic label, and pixels belonging to things classes (countable objects with instances, like cars and people) are assigned unique instance IDs.
This paper presents a new unified approach to semantic segmentation in both images and videos by using language modeling to output the masks as sequences of discrete tokens. We use run length encoding (RLE) to discretize the segmentation masks and then train a modified version of Pix2Seq \cite{p2s} to output these RLE tokens through autoregression. We propose novel tokenization strategies to compress the length of the token sequence to make it practicable to extend this approach to videos. We also show how instance information can be incorporated into the tokenization process to perform panoptic segmentation. We evaluate our proposed models on two datasets to show that they are competitive with the state of the art in spite of being bottlenecked by our limited computational resources.
Capturing 4D spatiotemporal surroundings is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, most existing methods address only one side of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes, or detailed 3D structures like voxel-based occupancy that lack explicit temporal association. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (LaGS) that advances spatiotemporal scene understanding in a holistic direction. Our approach incorporates camera-based end-to-end tracking with mask-based multi-view panoptic occupancy prediction, and addresses the key challenge of efficiently aggregating multi-view information into 3D voxel grids via a novel latent Gaussian splatting approach. Specifically, we first fuse observations into 3D Gaussians that serve as a sparse point-centric latent representation of the 3D scene, and then splat the aggregated features onto a 3D voxel grid that is decoded by a mask-based segmentation head. We evaluate LaGS on the Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance for 4D panoptic occupancy tracking. We make our code available at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.
LiDAR-camera fusion enhances 3D panoptic segmentation by leveraging camera images to complement sparse LiDAR scans, but it also introduces a critical failure mode. Under adverse conditions, degradation or failure of the camera sensor can significantly compromise the reliability of the perception system. To address this problem, we introduce UP-Fuse, a novel uncertainty-aware fusion framework in the 2D range-view that remains robust under camera sensor degradation, calibration drift, and sensor failure. Raw LiDAR data is first projected into the range-view and encoded by a LiDAR encoder, while camera features are simultaneously extracted and projected into the same shared space. At its core, UP-Fuse employs an uncertainty-guided fusion module that dynamically modulates cross-modal interaction using predicted uncertainty maps. These maps are learned by quantifying representational divergence under diverse visual degradations, ensuring that only reliable visual cues influence the fused representation. The fused range-view features are decoded by a novel hybrid 2D-3D transformer that mitigates spatial ambiguities inherent to the 2D projection and directly predicts 3D panoptic segmentation masks. Extensive experiments on Panoptic nuScenes, SemanticKITTI, and our introduced Panoptic Waymo benchmark demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of UP-Fuse, which maintains strong performance even under severe visual corruption or misalignment, making it well suited for robotic perception in safety-critical settings.
Adapting pre-trained vision models using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) remains challenging, as it aims to achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning using a minimal number of trainable parameters. When applied to complex dense prediction tasks, existing methods exhibit limitations, including input-agnostic modeling and redundant cross-layer representations. To this end, we propose AdaRoute, a new adapter-style method featuring a simple mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, we introduce shared expert centers, where each expert is a trainable parameter matrix. During a feedforward pass, each AdaRoute module in the network dynamically generates weight matrices tailored for the current module via a simple dynamic parameter routing mechanism, which selectively aggregates parameter matrices in the corresponding expert center. Dynamic weight matrices in AdaRoute modules facilitate low-rank adaptation in an input-dependent manner, thus generating more customized and powerful feature representations. Moreover, since AdaRoute modules across multiple network layers share the same expert center, they improve feature diversity by promoting implicit cross-layer feature interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of AdaRoute on diverse vision tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection and instance segmentation, and panoptic segmentation. Code will be available at: https://bit.ly/3NZcr0H.
3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) enables fast and high-quality scene reconstruction, but it lacks an object-consistent and semantically aware structure. We propose Split&Splat, a framework for panoptic scene reconstruction using 3DGS. Our approach explicitly models object instances. It first propagates instance masks across views using depth, thus producing view-consistent 2D masks. Each object is then reconstructed independently and merged back into the scene while refining its boundaries. Finally, instance-level semantic descriptors are embedded in the reconstructed objects, supporting various applications, including panoptic segmentation, object retrieval, and 3D editing. Unlike existing methods, Split&Splat tackles the problem by first segmenting the scene and then reconstructing each object individually. This design naturally supports downstream tasks and allows Split&Splat to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNetv2 segmentation benchmark.
Nuclei panoptic segmentation supports cancer diagnostics by integrating both semantic and instance segmentation of different cell types to analyze overall tissue structure and individual nuclei in histopathology images. Major challenges include detecting small objects, handling ambiguous boundaries, and addressing class imbalance. To address these issues, we propose PanopMamba, a novel hybrid encoder-decoder architecture that integrates Mamba and Transformer with additional feature-enhanced fusion via state space modeling. We design a multiscale Mamba backbone and a State Space Model (SSM)-based fusion network to enable efficient long-range perception in pyramid features, thereby extending the pure encoder-decoder framework while facilitating information sharing across multiscale features of nuclei. The proposed SSM-based feature-enhanced fusion integrates pyramid feature networks and dynamic feature enhancement across different spatial scales, enhancing the feature representation of densely overlapping nuclei in both semantic and spatial dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Mamba-based approach for panoptic segmentation. Additionally, we introduce alternative evaluation metrics, including image-level Panoptic Quality ($i$PQ), boundary-weighted PQ ($w$PQ), and frequency-weighted PQ ($fw$PQ), which are specifically designed to address the unique challenges of nuclei segmentation and thereby mitigate the potential bias inherent in vanilla PQ. Experimental evaluations on two multiclass nuclei segmentation benchmark datasets, MoNuSAC2020 and NuInsSeg, demonstrate the superiority of PanopMamba for nuclei panoptic segmentation over state-of-the-art methods. Consequently, the robustness of PanopMamba is validated across various metrics, while the distinctiveness of PQ variants is also demonstrated. Code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/PanopMamba.
Until open-world foundation models match the performance of specialized approaches, the effectiveness of deep learning models remains heavily dependent on dataset availability. Training data must align not only with the target object categories but also with the sensor characteristics and modalities. To bridge the gap between available datasets and deployment domains, domain adaptation strategies are widely used. In this work, we propose a novel approach to transferring sensor-specific knowledge from an image dataset to LiDAR, an entirely different sensing domain. Our method XD-MAP leverages detections from a neural network on camera images to create a semantic parametric map. The map elements are modeled to produce pseudo labels in the target domain without any manual annotation effort. Unlike previous domain transfer approaches, our method does not require direct overlap between sensors and enables extending the angular perception range from a front-view camera to a full 360 view. On our large-scale road feature dataset, XD-MAP outperforms single shot baseline approaches by +19.5 mIoU for 2D semantic segmentation, +19.5 PQth for 2D panoptic segmentation, and +32.3 mIoU in 3D semantic segmentation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach achieving strong performance on LiDAR data without any manual labeling.
The object-based nature of human visual attention is well-known in cognitive science, but has only played a minor role in computational visual attention models so far. This is mainly due to a lack of suitable datasets and evaluation metrics for object-based attention. To address these limitations, we present \dataset~ -- a novel 120-participant dataset of spatial street-crossing navigation in virtual reality specifically geared to object-based attention evaluations. The uniqueness of the presented dataset lies in the ethical and safety affiliated challenges that make collecting comparable data in real-world environments highly difficult. \dataset~ not only features accurate gaze data and a complete state-space representation of objects in the virtual environment, but it also offers variable scenario complexities and rich annotations, including panoptic segmentation, depth information, and vehicle keypoints. We further propose object-based similarity (oSIM) as a novel metric to evaluate the performance of object-based visual attention models, a previously unexplored performance characteristic. Our evaluations show that explicitly optimising for object-based attention not only improves oSIM performance but also leads to an improved model performance on common metrics. In addition, we present SUMGraph, a Mamba U-Net-based model, which explicitly encodes critical scene objects (vehicles) in a graph representation, leading to further performance improvements over several state-of-the-art visual attention prediction methods. The dataset, code and models will be publicly released.
We propose Motion-Compensated Latent Semantic Canvases (MCLSC) for visual situational awareness on resource-constrained edge devices. The core idea is to maintain persistent semantic metadata in two latent canvases - a slowly accumulating static layer and a rapidly updating dynamic layer - defined in a baseline coordinate frame stabilized from the video stream. Expensive panoptic segmentation (Mask2Former) runs asynchronously and is motion-gated: inference is triggered only when motion indicates new information, while stabilization/motion compensation preserves a consistent coordinate system for latent semantic memory. On prerecorded 480p clips, our prototype reduces segmentation calls by >30x and lowers mean end-to-end processing time by >20x compared to naive per-frame segmentation, while maintaining coherent static/dynamic semantic overlays.




Dominant paradigms for 4D LiDAR panoptic segmentation are usually required to train deep neural networks with large superimposed point clouds or design dedicated modules for instance association. However, these approaches perform redundant point processing and consequently become computationally expensive, yet still overlook the rich geometric priors inherently provided by raw point clouds. To this end, we introduce ICP-4D, a simple yet effective training-free framework that unifies spatial and temporal reasoning through geometric relations among instance-level point sets. Specifically, we apply the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm to directly associate temporally consistent instances by aligning the source and target point sets through the estimated transformation. To stabilize association under noisy instance predictions, we introduce a Sinkhorn-based soft matching. This exploits the underlying instance distribution to obtain accurate point-wise correspondences, resulting in robust geometric alignment. Furthermore, our carefully designed pipeline, which considers three instance types-static, dynamic, and missing-offers computational efficiency and occlusion-aware matching. Our extensive experiments across both SemanticKITTI and panoptic nuScenes demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, even without additional training or extra point cloud inputs.