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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07004/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12397/) (2020)
- [CLOCs: Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00784/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Object Detection Leveraging Accurate Proposals and Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01690/) (2019)
- [IPOD: Intensive Point-based Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05276/) (2018)
- [CNN-based Lidar Point Cloud De-Noising in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03874/) (2019)
- [Deformable PV-RCNN: Improving 3D Object Detection with Learned Deformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08766/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Object Detection to Common Corruptions in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11040/) (2023)
- [Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01643/) (2023)
- [L4DR: LiDAR-4DRadar Fusion for Weather-Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03677/) (2024)
- [AutoFed: Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Multimodal Learning for Robust Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08646/) (2023)
- [Survey on LiDAR Perception in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06312/) (2023)
- [Advancements in Point Cloud Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12113/) (2023)
- [UniMix: Towards Domain Adaptive and Generalizable LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05145/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-aware Mean Teacher for Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14651/) (2021)
- [How Do We Fail? Stress Testing Perception in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14155/) (2022)
- [CoBEV: Elevating Roadside 3D Object Detection with Depth and Height Complementarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02815/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02286/) (2024)
- [V2X-DGW: Domain Generalization for Multi-agent Perception under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11371/) (2024)
- [WeatherGen: A Unified Diverse Weather Generator for LiDAR Point Clouds via Spider Mamba Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13561/) (2025)
- [Sunshine to Rainstorm: Cross-Weather Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18493/) (2024)
- [Common Corruption Robustness of Point Cloud Detectors: Benchmark and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05896/) (2022)
- [Robust 3D Object Detection in Cold Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11925/) (2022)
- [TripleMixer: A 3D Point Cloud Denoising Model for Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13802/) (2024)
- [Domain Generalization of 3D Object Detection by Density-Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10845/) (2023)
- [Realistic Rainy Weather Simulation for LiDARs in CARLA Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12772/) (2023)
- [STAL3D: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Collaborating Self-Training and Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19362/) (2024)
- [SLiDE: Self-supervised LiDAR De-snowing through Reconstruction Difficulty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04043/) (2022)
- [Simulating Road Spray Effects in Automotive Lidar Sensor Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08558/) (2022)
- [3D Adversarial Augmentations for Robust Out-of-Domain Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15479/) (2023)
- [Improving Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion Model against Weather Corruption from Fusion Strategy Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02738/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of AI-Enabled Multi-sensor Fusion Systems: Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03454/) (2023)
- [ResLPR: A LiDAR Data Restoration Network and Benchmark for Robust Place Recognition Against Weather Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12350/) (2025)
- [How Hard Is Snow? A Paired Domain Adaptation Dataset for Clear and Snowy Weather: CADC+](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16531/) (2025)
- [3D Roadway Scene Object Detection with LIDARs in Snowfall Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22436/) (2025)
- [AURORA-KITTI: Any-Weather Depth Completion and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14701/) (2026)
- [OmniLiDAR: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Multi-Domain 3D LiDAR Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13815/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.