Lidar Light Scattering Augmentation (LISA): Physics-based Simulation of Adverse Weather Conditions for 3D Object Detection

Lidar-based object detectors are critical parts of the 3D perception pipeline in autonomous navigation systems such as self-driving cars. However, they are known to be sensitive to adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow and fog due to reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal-to-background ratio (SBR). As a result, lidar-based object detectors trained on data captured in normal weather tend to perform poorly in such scenarios. However, collecting and labelling sufficient training data in a diverse range of adverse weather conditions is laborious and prohibitively expensive. To address this issue, we propose a physics-based approach to simulate lidar point clouds of scenes in adverse weather conditions. These augmented datasets can then be used to train lidar-based detectors to improve their all-weather reliability. Specifically, we introduce a hybrid Monte-Carlo based approach that treats (i) the effects of large particles by placing them randomly and comparing their back reflected power against the target, and (ii) attenuation effects on average through calculation of scattering efficiencies from the Mie theory and particle size distributions. Retraining networks with this augmented data improves mean average precision evaluated on real world rainy scenes and we observe greater improvement in performance with our model relative to existing models from the literature. Furthermore, we evaluate recent state-of-the-art detectors on the simulated weather conditions and present an in-depth analysis of their performance.