# Improving LiDAR 3D Object Detection via Range-based Point Cloud Density Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [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)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11037/) (2021)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised 3D Shape Completion through GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13366/) (2021)
- [Point Density-Aware Voxels for LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05662/) (2022)
- [Unpaired Point Cloud Completion on Real Scans using Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00069/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Data Augmentation for LiDAR based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01643/) (2020)
- [Viewer-Centred Surface Completion for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06407/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RESOLVE: A Multi-Resolution and Multi-Modal Dataset for Roadside Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31895/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, much progress has been made in LiDAR-based 3D object detection mainly due to advances in detector architecture designs and availability of large-scale LiDAR datasets. Existing 3D object detectors tend to perform well on the point cloud regions closer to the LiDAR sensor as opposed to on regions that are farther away. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the data perspective instead of detector architecture design. We observe that there is a learning bias in detection models towards the dense objects near the sensor and show that the detection performance can be improved by simply manipulating the input point cloud density at different distance ranges without modifying the detector architecture and without data augmentation. We propose a model-free point cloud density adjustment pre-processing mechanism that uses iterative MCMC optimization to estimate optimal parameters for altering the point density at different distance ranges. We conduct experiments using four state-of-the-art LiDAR 3D object detectors on two public LiDAR datasets, namely Waymo and ONCE. Our results demonstrate that our range-based point cloud density manipulation technique can improve the performance of the existing detectors, which in turn could potentially inspire future detector designs.