A LiDAR Point Cloud Generator: from a Virtual World to Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework that generates labeled 3D LiDAR point clouds from virtual environments, enabling efficient training, testing, and robustness enhancement of autonomous driving neural networks.

Contribution

The framework allows rapid creation of labeled point clouds from virtual worlds, supporting both training data generation and vulnerability testing for neural networks.

Findings

+9% accuracy in point cloud segmentation with augmented data

Effective testing and retraining fix neural network blind spots

Supports sensor fusion with automatic calibration

Abstract

3D LiDAR scanners are playing an increasingly important role in autonomous driving as they can generate depth information of the environment. However, creating large 3D LiDAR point cloud datasets with point-level labels requires a significant amount of manual annotation. This jeopardizes the efficient development of supervised deep learning algorithms which are often data-hungry. We present a framework to rapidly create point clouds with accurate point-level labels from a computer game. The framework supports data collection from both auto-driving scenes and user-configured scenes. Point clouds from auto-driving scenes can be used as training data for deep learning algorithms, while point clouds from user-configured scenes can be used to systematically test the vulnerability of a neural network, and use the falsifying examples to make the neural network more robust through retraining. In addition, the scene images can be captured simultaneously in order for sensor fusion tasks, with a method proposed to do automatic calibration between the point clouds and captured scene images. We show a significant improvement in accuracy (+9%) in point cloud segmentation by augmenting the training dataset with the generated synthesized data. Our experiments also show by testing and retraining the network using point clouds from user-configured scenes, the weakness/blind spots of the neural network can be fixed.