  With the increasing reliance of self-driving and similar robotic systems on
robust 3D vision, the processing of LiDAR scans with deep convolutional neural
networks has become a trend in academia and industry alike. Prior attempts on
the challenging Semantic Scene Completion task - which entails the inference of
dense 3D structure and associated semantic labels from "sparse" representations
- have been, to a degree, successful in small indoor scenes when provided with
dense point clouds or dense depth maps often fused with semantic segmentation
maps from RGB images. However, the performance of these systems drop
drastically when applied to large outdoor scenes characterized by dynamic and
exponentially sparser conditions. Likewise, processing of the entire sparse
volume becomes infeasible due to memory limitations and workarounds introduce
computational inefficiency as practitioners are forced to divide the overall
volume into multiple equal segments and infer on each individually, rendering
real-time performance impossible. In this work, we formulate a method that
subsumes the sparsity of large-scale environments and present S3CNet, a sparse
convolution based neural network that predicts the semantically completed scene
from a single, unified LiDAR point cloud. We show that our proposed method
outperforms all counterparts on the 3D task, achieving state-of-the art results
on the SemanticKITTI benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a 2D variant of S3CNet
with a multi-view fusion strategy to complement our 3D network, providing
robustness to occlusions and extreme sparsity in distant regions. We conduct
experiments for the 2D semantic scene completion task and compare the results
of our sparse 2D network against several leading LiDAR segmentation models
adapted for bird's eye view segmentation on two open-source datasets.
