KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-Degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird’s-Eye-View Segmentation

Wenke E, Yixin Sun, Jiaxu Liu, Hubert P. H. Shum, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei and Toby P. Breckon
Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026

H5-Index: 131#Core A Conference

KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-Degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird’s-Eye-View Segmentation
‡ According to Core Ranking 2023
# According to Google Scholar 2025

Abstract

We present the first cross-modality distillation framework specifically tailored for single-panoramic-camera Bird’s- Eye-View (BEV) segmentation. Our approach leverages a novel LiDAR image representation fused from range, intensity and ambient channels, together with a voxel-aligned view transformer that preserves spatial fidelity while enabling efficient BEV processing. During training, a highcapacity LiDAR and camera fusion Teacher network extracts both rich spatial and semantic features for crossmodality knowledge distillation into a lightweight Student network that relies solely on a single 360-degree panoramic camera image. Extensive experiments on the Dur360BEV dataset demonstrate that our teacher model significantly outperforms existing camera-based BEV segmentation methods, achieving a 25.6% IoU improvement. Meanwhile, the distilled Student network attains competitive performance with an 8.5% IoU gain and state-of-theart inference speed of 31.2 FPS. Moreover, evaluations on KITTI-360 (two fisheye cameras) confirm that our distillation framework generalises to diverse camera setups, underscoring its feasibility and robustness. This approach reduces sensor complexity and deployment costs while providing a practical solution for efficient, low-cost BEV segmentation in real-world autonomous driving. The code is available at: https://github.com/Tom-E-Durham/KD360-VoxelBEV.


Downloads


YouTube


Cite This Research

Plain Text

Wenke E, Yixin Sun, Jiaxu Liu, Hubert P. H. Shum, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei and Toby P. Breckon, "KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-Degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird’s-Eye-View Segmentation," in Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, IEEE/CVF, 2026.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{e26kd360,
 author={E, Wenke and Sun, Yixin and Liu, Jiaxu and Shum, Hubert P. H. and Atapour-Abarghouei, Amir and Breckon, Toby P.},
 booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision},
 title={KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-Degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird’s-Eye-View Segmentation},
 year={2026},
 publisher={IEEE/CVF},
}

RIS

TY  - CONF
AU  - E, Wenke
AU  - Sun, Yixin
AU  - Liu, Jiaxu
AU  - Shum, Hubert P. H.
AU  - Atapour-Abarghouei, Amir
AU  - Breckon, Toby P.
T2  - Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision
TI  - KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-Degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird’s-Eye-View Segmentation
PY  - 2026
PB  - IEEE/CVF
ER  - 


Supporting Grants


Similar Research

Li Li, Hubert P. H. Shum and Toby P. Breckon, "Less is More: Reducing Task and Model Complexity for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation", Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
Li Li, Hubert P. H. Shum and Toby P. Breckon, "RAPiD-Seg: Range-Aware Pointwise Distance Distribution Networks for 3D LiDAR Segmentation", Proceedings of the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
Jiaxu Liu, Zhengdi Yu, Toby P. Breckon and Hubert P. H. Shum, "U3DS3: Unsupervised 3D Semantic Scene Segmentation", Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024
Li Li, Tanqiu Qiao, Hubert P. H. Shum and Toby P. Breckon, "TraIL-Det: Transformation-Invariant Local Feature Networks for 3D LiDAR Object Detection with Unsupervised Pre-Training", Proceedings of the 2024 British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2024

HomeGoogle ScholarLinkedInYouTubeGitHubORCIDResearchGateEmail
 
Print