OLiDM: Object-aware LiDAR Diffusion Models for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

OLiDM is a novel framework for generating high-quality, controllable LiDAR data at both object and scene levels, improving 3D perception and autonomous driving safety.

Contribution

OLiDM introduces a dual-module approach with object-scene progressive generation and semantic alignment, enabling controllable, high-fidelity LiDAR data synthesis for autonomous driving.

Findings

Outperforms UltraLiDAR by 17.5 in FPD on KITTI-360

Achieves 57.47% improvement in semantic IoU over LiDARGen

Enhances 3D detector performance by 2.4% mAP and 1.9% NDS

Abstract

To enhance autonomous driving safety in complex scenarios, various methods have been proposed to simulate LiDAR point cloud data. Nevertheless, these methods often face challenges in producing high-quality, diverse, and controllable foreground objects. To address the needs of object-aware tasks in 3D perception, we introduce OLiDM, a novel framework capable of generating high-fidelity LiDAR data at both the object and the scene levels. OLiDM consists of two pivotal components: the Object-Scene Progressive Generation (OPG) module and the Object Semantic Alignment (OSA) module. OPG adapts to user-specific prompts to generate desired foreground objects, which are subsequently employed as conditions in scene generation, ensuring controllable outputs at both the object and scene levels. This also facilitates the association of user-defined object-level annotations with the generated LiDAR scenes. Moreover, OSA aims to rectify the misalignment between foreground objects and background scenes, enhancing the overall quality of the generated objects. The broad effectiveness of OLiDM is demonstrated across various LiDAR generation tasks, as well as in 3D perception tasks. Specifically, on the KITTI-360 dataset, OLiDM surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods such as UltraLiDAR by 17.5 in FPD. Additionally, in sparse-to-dense LiDAR completion, OLiDM achieves a significant improvement over LiDARGen, with a 57.47\% increase in semantic IoU. Moreover, OLiDM enhances the performance of mainstream 3D detectors by 2.4\% in mAP and 1.9\% in NDS, underscoring its potential in advancing object-aware 3D tasks. Code is available at: https://yanty123.github.io/OLiDM.