# Fog Simulation on Real LiDAR Point Clouds for 3D Object Detection in Adverse Weather

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12365/) (2019)
- [The ApolloScape Open Dataset for Autonomous Driving and its Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06184/) (2018)
- [A2D2: Audi Autonomous Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06320/) (2020)
- [Synscapes: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Street Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08705/) (2018)
- [Model Adaptation with Synthetic and Real Data for Semantic Dense Foggy Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01265/) (2018)
- [Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10117/) (2020)
- [The H3D Dataset for Full-Surround 3D Multi-Object Detection and Tracking in Crowded Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01568/) (2019)
- [Rain rendering for evaluating and improving robustness to bad weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03683/) (2020)
- [LIBRE: The Multiple 3D LiDAR Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06129/) (2020)
- [Weather Influence and Classification with Automotive Lidar Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07675/) (2019)
- [Semantic Understanding of Foggy Scenes with Purely Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03997/) (2019)
- [Gated3D: Monocular 3D Object Detection From Temporal Illumination Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03602/) (2021)
- [What happens to a ToF LiDAR in fog?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06660/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Object Detection to Common Corruptions in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11040/) (2023)
- [Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09042/) (2025)
- [LiDAR Snowfall Simulation for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15118/) (2022)
- [Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01643/) (2023)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild: Learning Generalized Models for Adverse-Condition Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00690/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive Object Detection for Autonomous Driving under Foggy Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15176/) (2022)
- [L4DR: LiDAR-4DRadar Fusion for Weather-Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03677/) (2024)
- [HRFuser: A Multi-resolution Sensor Fusion Architecture for 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15157/) (2022)
- [Is Your LiDAR Placement Optimized for 3D Scene Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17009/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation using Compositional Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05247/) (2023)
- [UniMix: Towards Domain Adaptive and Generalizable LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05145/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00970/) (2023)
- [CoBEV: Elevating Roadside 3D Object Detection with Depth and Height Complementarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02815/) (2023)
- [V2X-R: Cooperative LiDAR-4D Radar Fusion with Denoising Diffusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08402/) (2024)
- [MultiCorrupt: A Multi-Modal Robustness Dataset and Benchmark of LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11677/) (2024)
- [MSC-Bench: Benchmarking and Analyzing Multi-Sensor Corruption for Driving Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01037/) (2025)
- [4DenoiseNet: Adverse Weather Denoising from Adjacent Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07121/) (2022)
- [Analyzing Infrastructure LiDAR Placement with Realistic LiDAR Simulation Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15975/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02286/) (2024)
- [DSRC: Learning Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware Collaborative Representation against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10739/) (2024)
- [V2X-DGW: Domain Generalization for Multi-agent Perception under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11371/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Training State-of-the-Art LiDAR Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14870/) (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)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work addresses the challenging task of LiDAR-based 3D object detection in foggy weather. Collecting and annotating data in such a scenario is very time, labor and cost intensive. In this paper, we tackle this problem by simulating physically accurate fog into clear-weather scenes, so that the abundant existing real datasets captured in clear weather can be repurposed for our task. Our contributions are twofold: 1) We develop a physically valid fog simulation method that is applicable to any LiDAR dataset. This unleashes the acquisition of large-scale foggy training data at no extra cost. These partially synthetic data can be used to improve the robustness of several perception methods, such as 3D object detection and tracking or simultaneous localization and mapping, on real foggy data. 2) Through extensive experiments with several state-of-the-art detection approaches, we show that our fog simulation can be leveraged to significantly improve the performance for 3D object detection in the presence of fog. Thus, we are the first to provide strong 3D object detection baselines on the Seeing Through Fog dataset. Our code is available at www.trace.ethz.ch/lidar_fog_simulation.