TripleMixer: A 3D Point Cloud Denoising Model for Adverse Weather

TL;DR

TripleMixer is a novel 3D point cloud denoising model that effectively reduces noise caused by adverse weather, improving downstream perception tasks in autonomous driving.

Contribution

It introduces a robust denoising network integrating spatial, frequency, and channel-wise processing, along with large-scale datasets and benchmarks for evaluation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance

Improves downstream perception tasks without retraining

Demonstrates robustness across simulated and real-world weather conditions

Abstract

Adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain pose significant challenges to LiDAR-based perception models by introducing noise and corrupting point cloud measurements. To address this issue, we propose TripleMixer, a robust and efficient point cloud denoising network that integrates spatial, frequency, and channel-wise processing through three specialized mixer modules. TripleMixer effectively suppresses high-frequency noise while preserving essential geometric structures and can be seamlessly deployed as a plug-and-play module within existing LiDAR perception pipelines. To support the development and evaluation of denoising methods, we construct two large-scale simulated datasets, Weather-KITTI and Weather-NuScenes, covering diverse weather scenarios with dense point-wise semantic and noise annotations. Based on these datasets, we establish four benchmarks: Denoising, Semantic Segmentation (SS), Place Recognition (PR), and Object Detection (OD). These benchmarks enable systematic evaluation of denoising generalization, transferability, and downstream impact under both simulated and real-world adverse weather conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TripleMixer achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance and yields substantial improvements across all downstream tasks without requiring retraining. Our results highlight the potential of denoising as a task-agnostic preprocessing strategy to enhance LiDAR robustness in real-world autonomous driving applications.