Title
Learning to Simulate Realistic LiDARs.
Abstract
Simulating realistic sensors is a challenging part in data generation for autonomous systems, often involving carefully handcrafted sensor design, scene properties, and physics modeling. To alleviate this, we introduce a pipeline for data-driven simulation of a realistic LiDAR sensor. We propose a model that learns a mapping between RGB images and corresponding LiDAR features such as raydrop or per-point intensities directly from real datasets. We show that our model can learn to encode realistic effects such as dropped points on transparent surfaces or high intensity returns on reflective materials. When applied to naively raycasted point clouds provided by off-the-shelf simulator software, our model enhances the data by predicting intensities and removing points based on the scene's appearance to match a real LiDAR sensor. We use our technique to learn models of two distinct LiDAR sensors and use them to improve simulated LiDAR data accordingly. Through a sample task of vehicle segmentation, we show that enhancing simulated point clouds with our technique improves downstream task performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981120
IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benoit Guillard100.34
Sai Vemprala213.73
Jayesh K. Gupta3889.68
Miksik Ondrej440314.28
Vibhav Vineet5104337.41
Pascal Fua612768731.45
Ashish Kapoor71833119.72