# 3D LiDAR Mapping in Dynamic Environments Using a 4D Implicit Neural Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03388 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03388/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04334/) (2022)
- [DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11082/) (2022)
- [Tensor4D : Efficient Neural 4D Decomposition for High-fidelity Dynamic Reconstruction and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11610/) (2022)
- [ReFusion: 3D Reconstruction in Dynamic Environments for RGB-D Cameras Exploiting Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02082/) (2019)
- [D2NeRF: Self-Supervised Decoupling of Dynamic and Static Objects from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15838/) (2022)
- [SemanticFusion: Dense 3D Semantic Mapping with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05130/) (2016)
- [KISS-ICP: In Defense of Point-to-Point ICP -- Simple, Accurate, and Robust Registration If Done the Right Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15397/) (2022)
- [iSDF: Real-Time Neural Signed Distance Fields for Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02296/) (2022)
- [Neural Kernel Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19590/) (2023)
- [MaskFusion: Real-Time Recognition, Tracking and Reconstruction of Multiple Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09194/) (2018)
- [Neural Trajectory Fields for Dynamic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05994/) (2021)
- [STaR: Self-supervised Tracking and Reconstruction of Rigid Objects in Motion with Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01602/) (2020)
- [vMAP: Vectorised Object Mapping for Neural Field SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01838/) (2023)
- [Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01643/) (2023)
- [Moving Object Segmentation in 3D LiDAR Data: A Learning-based Approach Exploiting Sequential Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08971/) (2021)

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

- [HiMo: High-Speed Objects Motion Compensation in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00803/) (2025)
- [RENO: Real-Time Neural Compression for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12382/) (2025)
- [PINGS: Gaussian Splatting Meets Distance Fields within a Point-Based Implicit Neural Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05752/) (2025)
- [NoKSR: Kernel-Free Neural Surface Reconstruction via Point Cloud Serialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12534/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing the Dynamic World: A Representation-Centric View of 4D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39960/) (2026)
- [Temporal Overlapping Prediction: A Self-supervised Pre-training Method for LiDAR Moving Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07167/) (2025)
- [LAPS: Improving Incremental LiDAR Mapping using Active Pooling and Sampling for Neural Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15496/) (2026)
- [DynaTok: Token-Based 4D Reconstruction from Partial Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12189/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Building accurate maps is a key building block to enable reliable localization, planning, and navigation of autonomous vehicles. We propose a novel approach for building accurate maps of dynamic environments utilizing a sequence of LiDAR scans. To this end, we propose encoding the 4D scene into a novel spatio-temporal implicit neural map representation by fitting a time-dependent truncated signed distance function to each point. Using our representation, we extract the static map by filtering the dynamic parts. Our neural representation is based on sparse feature grids, a globally shared decoder, and time-dependent basis functions, which we jointly optimize in an unsupervised fashion. To learn this representation from a sequence of LiDAR scans, we design a simple yet efficient loss function to supervise the map optimization in a piecewise way. We evaluate our approach on various scenes containing moving objects in terms of the reconstruction quality of static maps and the segmentation of dynamic point clouds. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is capable of removing the dynamic part of the input point clouds while reconstructing accurate and complete 3D maps, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRBonn/4dNDF
