Semantic-ITC: A Frame-wise Indoor Mobile Laser Scanning Dataset and Benchmark for Semantic Segmentation

Frame-wise semantic segmentation of indoor lidar scans is a fundamental step toward higher-level 3D scene understanding and mapping applications. However, acquiring frame-wise ground truth for training deep learning models is costly and time-consuming. This challenge is largely addressed, for imagery, by Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) which segment image frames. The same VFMs may be used to train a lidar scan frame segmentation model via a 2D-to-3D distillation pipeline. The success of such distillation has been shown for autonomous driving scenes, but not yet for indoor scenes. Here, we study the feasibility of repeating this success for indoor scenes, in a frame-wise distillation manner by coupling each lidar scan with a VFM-processed camera image. The evaluation is done using indoor SLAM datasets, where pseudo-labels are used for downstream evaluation. Also, a small manually annotated lidar dataset is provided for validation, as there are no other lidar frame-wise indoor datasets with semantics. Results show that the distilled model achieves up to 56% mIoU under pseudo-label evaluation and around 36% mIoU with real-label, demonstrating the feasibility of cross-modal distillation for indoor lidar semantic segmentation without manual annotations.

Geometric high-fidelity mesh reconstruction from LiDAR-inertial scans remains challenging in large, complex indoor environments -- such as cultural buildings -- where point cloud sparsity, geometric drift, and fixed fusion parameters produce holes, over-smoothing, and spurious surfaces at structural boundaries. We propose a modular, incremental RGB+LiDAR pipeline that generates incremental semantics-aided high-quality meshes from indoor scans through scan frame-based direct label transfer. A vision foundation model labels each incoming RGB frame; labels are incrementally projected and fused onto a LiDAR-inertial odometry map; and an incremental semantics-aware Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) fusion step produces the final mesh via marching cubes. This frame-level fusion strategy preserves the geometric fidelity of LiDAR while leveraging rich visual semantics to resolve geometric ambiguities at reconstruction boundaries caused by LiDAR point-cloud sparsity and geometric drift. We demonstrate that semantic guidance improves geometric reconstruction quality; quantitative evaluation is therefore performed using geometric metrics on the Oxford Spires dataset, while results from the NTU VIRAL dataset are analyzed qualitatively. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art geometric baselines ImMesh and Voxblox, demonstrating the benefit of semantics-aided fusion for geometric mesh quality. The resulting semantically labelled meshes are of value when reconstructing Universal Scene Description (USD) assets, offering a path from indoor LiDAR scanning to XR and digital modeling.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been used as structured decoders for indoor understanding from 3D point-token inputs. However, point cloud encoders often under-represent thin structural elements such as doors and windows after voxelization and sparse pooling, and may miss individual furniture instances in cluttered scenes. We propose an interface-preserving semantic augmentation for LLM-conditioned structured decoding. The key idea is to associate semantic evidence with the point-cloud representation, reduce it to a coarse four-group code (furniture, walls, openings, and others), and encode it as an RGBB point interface: red for furniture, green for walls, blue for openings, and black for others, where RGBB denotes four semantic color states represented in three RGB channels rather than an additional fourth channel. This semantic color code is appended to the original raw point attributes before tokenization, so geometry and semantics share the same sparse tokenization path while the downstream language model decoder and output serialization remain unchanged. We further introduce a lightweight routed semantic shift module, with an auxiliary head used only for training-time ratio/budget regularization and analysis, to strengthen semantic cues after sparse pooling. The overall pipeline can use RGB-derived semantic evidence. Under these controlled semantic-source settings, the reported metrics improve across Structured3D, the SpatialLM dataset, and ARKitScenes, especially for opening localization and per-instance furniture detection in cluttered scenes. Ablations clarify the roles of semantic source, color coding, token fusion, and shift injection, while also showing that color/entropy effects remain nontrivial.