Toward Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Real-World Deployment: Evaluation under Coarse Labels, Adverse Conditions, and Domain Shifts

Abstract:LiDAR-based semantic segmentation is a core perception module for autonomous vehicles and mobile robots. Despite the strong performance of recent state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks, existing evaluation protocols remain focused on clean, single-domain settings and fine-grained label taxonomies, leaving deployment readiness largely unassessed. Real-world systems must handle safety-critical label semantics, degraded sensing conditions, and cross-domain variability, yet no unified protocol currently addresses all three aspects together. In this paper, we propose a structured evaluation protocol that assesses the deployment readiness of LiDAR semantic segmentation models along three complementary dimensions: (i) coarse-label evaluation aligned with autonomous driving safety priorities, revealing how label granularity affects different methods; (ii) robustness under eight types of LiDAR corruptions designed to emulate real-world atmospheric, geometric, and sensor degradations; and (iii) domain generalization across datasets without adaptation. The evaluation includes inference speed measured on an embedded Jetson AGX Orin platform, directly reflecting deployment constraints. Our results show that fine-grained benchmark rankings do not always reflect safety-relevant performance, that all methods experience substantial degradation under corruptions with architecture-dependent robustness characteristics, and that current domain generalization remains insufficient for reliable deployment. These findings expose concrete gaps between benchmark performance and deployment readiness, and provide a reference protocol for more practically grounded evaluation of LiDAR semantic segmentation.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.02830 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.02830v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.02830 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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