Deep Generative Modeling of LiDAR Data

Building models capable of generating structured output is a key challenge for AI and robotics. While generative models have been explored on many types of data, little work has been done on synthesizing lidar scans, which play a key role in robot mapping and localization. In this work, we show that one can adapt deep generative models for this task by unravelling lidar scans into a multi-channel 2D signal. Our approach can generate high quality samples, while simultaneously learning a meaningful latent representation of the data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is robust to noisy input - the learned model can recover the underlying lidar scan from seemingly uninformative data.