# A Survey on Deep Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02377 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02377/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04779/) (2016)
- [FlowNet3D: Learning Scene Flow in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01411/) (2018)
- [SqueezeSegV2: Improved Model Structure and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Road-Object Segmentation from a LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08495/) (2018)
- [Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03950/) (2019)
- [A2D2: Audi Autonomous Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06320/) (2020)
- [SqueezeSegV3: Spatially-Adaptive Convolution for Efficient Point-Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01803/) (2020)
- [SPLATNet: Sparse Lattice Networks for Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08275/) (2018)
- [Open Set Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10427/) (2018)
- [Escape from Cells: Deep Kd-Networks for the Recognition of 3D Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01222/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [xMUDA: Cross-Modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12676/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02200/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Segment Any Point Cloud Sequences by Distilling Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09347/) (2023)
- [LaserMix for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00026/) (2022)
- [ConDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Segmentation via Regularized Domain Concatenation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15242/) (2021)
- [DI-V2X: Learning Domain-Invariant Representation for Vehicle-Infrastructure Collaborative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15742/) (2023)
- [4D Contrastive Superflows are Dense 3D Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06190/) (2024)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Multi-Space Alignments Towards Universal LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01538/) (2024)
- [Survey on LiDAR Perception in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06312/) (2023)
- [Automated forest inventory: analysis of high-density airborne LiDAR point clouds with 3D deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15084/) (2023)
- [SALUDA: Surface-based Automotive Lidar Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03251/) (2023)
- [Generative Range Imaging for Learning Scene Priors of 3D LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11750/) (2022)
- [Instant Domain Augmentation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14378/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Cross-Domain Policy Transfer for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04580/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-UDA: Self-ensembling Through Time for Unsupervised LiDAR Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13523/) (2023)
- [360^circ from a Single Camera: A Few-Shot Approach for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06197/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Training State-of-the-Art LiDAR Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14870/) (2024)
- [LargeAD: Large-Scale Cross-Sensor Data Pretraining for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04005/) (2025)
- [Annotator: A Generic Active Learning Baseline for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20293/) (2023)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)
- [Real-Time and Robust 3D Object Detection Within Road-Side LiDARs Using Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00132/) (2022)
- [Deep Transfer Learning for Intelligent Vehicle Perception: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15110/) (2023)
- [EventFly: Event Camera Perception from Ground to the Sky](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19916/) (2025)
- [Real-Time And Robust 3D Object Detection with Roadside LiDARs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05200/) (2022)
- [Quantifying the LiDAR Sim-to-Real Domain Shift: A Detailed Investigation Using Object Detectors and Analyzing Point Clouds at Target-Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01899/) (2023)
- [Domain-Adaptive Neural Posterior Estimation for Strong Gravitational Lens Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16347/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Label Itself: Latent Labels Enhance Semi-supervised Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08234/) (2023)
- [A Realism Metric for Generated LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14958/) (2022)
- [On the Calibration of Uncertainty Estimation in LiDAR-based Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02248/) (2023)
- [T-UDA: Temporal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Sequential Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08302/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scalable systems for automated driving have to reliably cope with an open-world setting. This means, the perception systems are exposed to drastic domain shifts, like changes in weather conditions, time-dependent aspects, or geographic regions. Covering all domains with annotated data is impossible because of the endless variations of domains and the time-consuming and expensive annotation process. Furthermore, fast development cycles of the system additionally introduce hardware changes, such as sensor types and vehicle setups, and the required knowledge transfer from simulation. To enable scalable automated driving, it is therefore crucial to address these domain shifts in a robust and efficient manner. Over the last years, a vast amount of different domain adaptation techniques evolved. There already exists a number of survey papers for domain adaptation on camera images, however, a survey for LiDAR perception is absent. Nevertheless, LiDAR is a vital sensor for automated driving that provides detailed 3D scans of the vehicle's surroundings. To stimulate future research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of recent progress in domain adaptation methods and formulates interesting research questions specifically targeted towards LiDAR perception.