# Lidar Upsampling with Sliced Wasserstein Distance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13558 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13558/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation with Continuous Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12320/) (2019)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06520/) (2020)
- [PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06761/) (2018)
- [3D Point Cloud Generative Adversarial Network Based on Tree Structured Graph Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06292/) (2019)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00280/) (2019)
- [Max-Sliced Wasserstein Distance and its use for GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05877/) (2019)
- [PointGrow: Autoregressively Learned Point Cloud Generation with Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05591/) (2018)
- [Patch-based Progressive 3D Point Set Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11286/) (2018)
- [PU-GCN: Point Cloud Upsampling using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03264/) (2019)
- [EC-Net: an Edge-aware Point set Consolidation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06010/) (2018)
- [Point Cloud GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05795/) (2018)
- [Point Cloud Upsampling via Disentangled Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04779/) (2021)
- [Deep Generative Modeling of LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01180/) (2018)
- [Distributional Sliced-Wasserstein and Applications to Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07367/) (2020)
- [Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10124/) (2019)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05408/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Energy-Based Sliced Wasserstein Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13586/) (2023)
- [Quasi-Monte Carlo for 3D Sliced Wasserstein](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11713/) (2023)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Estimation with Control Variates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00402/) (2023)
- [Sliced Wasserstein with Random-Path Projecting Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15889/) (2024)
- [TULIP: Transformer for Upsampling of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06733/) (2023)
- [PU-Ray: Domain-Independent Point Cloud Upsampling via Ray Marching on Neural Implicit Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08755/) (2023)
- [Guided Model-based LiDAR Super-Resolution for Resource-Efficient Automotive scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01317/) (2025)
- [Fast and Accurate Outlier-Aware LiDAR Super-Resolution for SLAM Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28607/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lidar became an important component of the perception systems in autonomous driving. But challenges of training data acquisition and annotation made emphasized the role of the sensor to sensor domain adaptation. In this work, we address the problem of lidar upsampling. Learning on lidar point clouds is rather a challenging task due to their irregular and sparse structure. Here we propose a method for lidar point cloud upsampling which can reconstruct fine-grained lidar scan patterns. The key idea is to utilize edge-aware dense convolutions for both feature extraction and feature expansion. Additionally applying a more accurate Sliced Wasserstein Distance facilitates learning of the fine lidar sweep structures. This in turn enables our method to employ a one-stage upsampling paradigm without the need for coarse and fine reconstruction. We conduct several experiments to evaluate our method and demonstrate that it provides better upsampling.