LiDAR Data Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Generative modeling of 3D LiDAR data is an emerging task with promising applications for autonomous mobile robots, such as scalable simulation, scene manipulation, and sparse-to-dense completion of LiDAR point clouds. Existing approaches have shown the feasibility of image-based LiDAR data generation using deep generative models while still struggling with the fidelity of generated data and training instability. In this work, we present R2DM, a novel generative model for LiDAR data that can generate diverse and high-fidelity 3D scene point clouds based on the image representation of range and reflectance intensity. Our method is based on the denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), which have demonstrated impressive results among generative model frameworks and have been significantly progressing in recent years. To effectively train DDPMs on the LiDAR domain, we first conduct an in-depth analysis regarding data representation, training objective, and spatial inductive bias. Based on our designed model R2DM, we also introduce a flexible LiDAR completion pipeline using the powerful properties of DDPMs. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines on the generation task of KITTI-360 and KITTI-Raw datasets and the upsampling task of KITTI-360 datasets. Our code and pre-trained weights will be available at https://github.com/kazuto1011/r2dm.

Learning to Drop Points for LiDAR Scan Synthesis

Generative modeling of 3D scenes is a crucial topic for aiding mobile robots to improve unreliable observations. However, despite the rapid progress in the natural image domain, building generative models is still challenging for 3D data, such as point clouds. Most existing studies on point clouds have focused on small and uniform-density data. In contrast, 3D LiDAR point clouds widely used in mobile robots are non-trivial to be handled because of the large number of points and varying-density. To circumvent this issue, 3D-to-2D projected representation such as a cylindrical depth map has been studied in existing LiDAR processing tasks but susceptible to discrete lossy pixels caused by failures of laser reflection. This paper proposes a novel framework based on generative adversarial networks to synthesize realistic LiDAR data as an improved 2D representation. Our generative architectures are designed to learn a distribution of inverse depth maps and simultaneously simulate the lossy pixels, which enables us to decompose an underlying smooth geometry and the corresponding uncertainty of laser reflection. To simulate the lossy pixels, we propose a differentiable framework to learn to produce sample-dependent binary masks using the Gumbel-Sigmoid reparametrization trick. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesis and reconstruction tasks on two LiDAR datasets. We further showcase potential applications by recovering various corruptions in LiDAR data.