# LiDAR-NeRF: Novel LiDAR View Synthesis via Neural Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [SqueezeSeg: Convolutional Neural Nets with Recurrent CRF for Real-Time Road-Object Segmentation from 3D LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07368/) (2017)
- [DONeRF: Towards Real-Time Rendering of Compact Neural Radiance Fields using Depth Oracle Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03231/) (2021)
- [GRF: Learning a General Radiance Field for 3D Representation and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04595/) (2020)
- [InfoNeRF: Ray Entropy Minimization for Few-Shot Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15399/) (2021)
- [Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15224/) (2022)
- [LiDARsim: Realistic LiDAR Simulation by Leveraging the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09348/) (2020)
- [S-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00749/) (2023)
- [Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real LiDAR Point Cloud for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05399/) (2021)
- [A LiDAR Point Cloud Generator: from a Virtual World to Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00103/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14951/) (2022)
- [KITTI-CARLA: a KITTI-like dataset generated by CARLA Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00892/) (2021)

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

- [LidarDM: Generative LiDAR Simulation in a Generated World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02903/) (2024)
- [LiDAR4D: Dynamic Neural Fields for Novel Space-time View LiDAR Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02742/) (2024)
- [Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation using Compositional Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05247/) (2023)
- [Forging Vision Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving: Challenges, Methodologies, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08045/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13816/) (2024)
- [FrugalNeRF: Fast Convergence for Extreme Few-shot Novel View Synthesis without Learned Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16271/) (2024)
- [AlignMiF: Geometry-Aligned Multimodal Implicit Field for LiDAR-Camera Joint Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17483/) (2024)
- [HO-Gaussian: Hybrid Optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20032/) (2024)
- [NeRFs in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01333/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-GS:Real-time LiDAR Re-Simulation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05111/) (2024)
- [RadarSplat: Radar Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Data Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction of Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01379/) (2025)
- [Unifying Appearance Codes and Bilateral Grids for Driving Scene Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05280/) (2025)
- [LiDAR-RT: Gaussian-based Ray Tracing for Dynamic LiDAR Re-simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15199/) (2024)
- [RealEngine: Simulating Autonomous Driving in Realistic Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16902/) (2025)
- [PlatoNeRF: 3D Reconstruction in Plato's Cave via Single-View Two-Bounce Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14239/) (2023)
- [Bayesian NeRF: Quantifying Uncertainty with Volume Density for Neural Implicit Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06727/) (2024)
- [LiHi-GS: LiDAR-Supervised Gaussian Splatting for Highway Driving Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15447/) (2024)
- [GeoNLF: Geometry guided Pose-Free Neural LiDAR Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05597/) (2024)
- [PC-NeRF: Parent-Child Neural Radiance Fields Using Sparse LiDAR Frames in Autonomous Driving Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09325/) (2024)
- [Transfer Your Perspective: Controllable 3D Generation from Any Viewpoint in a Driving Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06682/) (2025)
- [LiDAR-VGGT: Cross-Modal Coarse-to-Fine Fusion for Globally Consistent and Metric-Scale Dense Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01186/) (2025)
- [OmniGen: Unified Multimodal Sensor Generation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14225/) (2025)
- [LiDAR-EDIT: LiDAR Data Generation by Editing the Object Layouts in Real-World Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00592/) (2024)
- [RF4D:Neural Radar Fields for Novel View Synthesis in Outdoor Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20967/) (2025)
- [InvRGB+L: Inverse Rendering of Complex Scenes with Unified Color and LiDAR Reflectance Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17613/) (2025)
- [SimULi: Real-Time LiDAR and Camera Simulation with Unscented Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12901/) (2025)
- [PC-NeRF: Parent-Child Neural Radiance Fields under Partial Sensor Data Loss in Autonomous Driving Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00874/) (2023)
- [Gated Fields: Learning Scene Reconstruction from Gated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19819/) (2024)
- [UnMix-NeRF: Spectral Unmixing Meets Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21884/) (2025)
- [TREND: Unsupervised 3D Representation Learning via Temporal Forecasting for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03054/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a new task, novel view synthesis for LiDAR sensors. While traditional model-based LiDAR simulators with style-transfer neural networks can be applied to render novel views, they fall short of producing accurate and realistic LiDAR patterns because the renderers rely on explicit 3D reconstruction and exploit game engines, that ignore important attributes of LiDAR points. We address this challenge by formulating, to the best of our knowledge, the first differentiable end-to-end LiDAR rendering framework, LiDAR-NeRF, leveraging a neural radiance field (NeRF) to facilitate the joint learning of geometry and the attributes of 3D points. However, simply employing NeRF cannot achieve satisfactory results, as it only focuses on learning individual pixels while ignoring local information, especially at low texture areas, resulting in poor geometry. To this end, we have taken steps to address this issue by introducing a structural regularization method to preserve local structural details. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we establish an object-centric multi-view LiDAR dataset, dubbed NeRF-MVL. It contains observations of objects from 9 categories seen from 360-degree viewpoints captured with multiple LiDAR sensors. Our extensive experiments on the scene-level KITTI-360 dataset, and on our object-level NeRF-MVL show that our LiDAR-NeRF surpasses the model-based algorithms significantly.