# Weather Influence and Classification with Automotive Lidar Sensors

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how automotive lidar sensors perform in heavy rain and fog, introduces a method to detect weather conditions using lidar data, and aims to enhance autonomous vehicle safety in adverse weather.

## Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of lidar performance under harsh weather and introduces a novel lidar-based weather detection method with high accuracy.

## Key findings

- Lidar performance degrades in heavy rain and fog.
- Proposed weather detection method achieves 97.14% accuracy.
- Analysis helps improve safety in autonomous driving under adverse conditions.

## Abstract

Lidar sensors are often used in mobile robots and autonomous vehicles to complement camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors for environment perception. Typically, perception algorithms are trained to only detect moving and static objects as well as ground estimation, but intentionally ignore weather effects to reduce false detections. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of automotive lidar performance under harsh weather conditions, i.e. heavy rain and dense fog. An extensive data set has been recorded for various fog and rain conditions, which is the basis for the conducted in-depth analysis of the point cloud under changing environmental conditions. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to detect and classify rain or fog with lidar sensors only and achieve an mean union over intersection of 97.14 % for a data set in controlled environments. The analysis of weather influences on the performance of lidar sensors and the weather detection are important steps towards improving safety levels for autonomous driving in adverse weather conditions by providing reliable information to adapt vehicle behavior.