D^3CTTA: Domain-Dependent Decorrelation for Continual Test-Time Adaption of 3D LiDAR Segmentation

Adapting pre-trained LiDAR segmentation models to dynamic domain shifts during testing is of paramount importance for the safety of autonomous driving. Most existing methods neglect the influence of domain changes and point density in continual test-time adaption (CTTA), relying on backpropagation and large batch sizes for stability. We approach this problem with three insights: 1) Point clouds at different distances usually have different densities resulting in distribution disparities; 2) The feature distribution of different domains varies, and domainaware parameters can alleviate domain gaps; 3) Features are highly correlated and make segmentation of different labels confusing. To this end, this work presents D 3 CTTA, an online backpropagation-free framework for 3D continual test-time adaption for LiDAR segmentation. D 3 CTTA consists of a distance-aware prototype learning module to integrate LiDAR-based geometry prior and a domain-dependent decorrelation module to reduce feature correlations among different domains and different categories. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks showcase that our method achieves a state-of-the-art performance compared to both backpropagation-based methods and backpropagation-free methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhaoJichun1/D3CTTA .