Efficient Continuous Semantic Mapping based on Spatio-Temporal Awareness

Abstract

Continuous semantic mapping allows autonomous robots to understand both the spatial structure and the semantic content of complex environments. However, most existing methods process the entire space, treat voxels as independent units, and do not keep the semantic labels consistent over time. This leads to high computational cost and reduced robustness in dynamic scenes. This paper proposes a semantic mapping method that brings spatial and temporal relationships into the semantic inference process. The method adjusts the inference range according to the local semantic uncertainty and fuses labels over time to improve map stability and computational efficiency. Experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset show that the proposed method improves mapping accuracy by about 12% and reaches an mIoU of 54.92%, which is 13.18 percentage points higher than spatial-only mapping. These results show that spatiotemporal reasoning is effective for continuous semantic mapping in autonomous robotic systems.