# Image-Guided Outdoor LiDAR Perception Quality Assessment for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17265 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17265/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [PointCloud Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01687/) (2018)
- [PillarNet: Real-Time and High-Performance Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07403/) (2022)
- [Sparse4D v2: Recurrent Temporal Fusion with Sparse Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14018/) (2023)
- [Cross Modal Transformer: Towards Fast and Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01283/) (2023)
- [Sparse4D v3: Advancing End-to-End 3D Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11722/) (2023)
- [FocalFormer3D : Focusing on Hard Instance for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04556/) (2023)
- [PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04925/) (2023)
- [No-Reference Quality Assessment for 3D Colored Point Cloud and Mesh Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02041/) (2021)
- [VISTA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09704/) (2022)
- [Grad-PU: Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling via Gradient Descent with Learned Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11846/) (2023)
- [MM-PCQA: Multi-Modal Learning for No-reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00244/) (2022)
- [No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment via Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02851/) (2021)
- [End-to-end training of object class detectors for mean average precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03476/) (2016)
- [A General Gaussian Heatmap Label Assignment for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12848/) (2021)
- [AD-PT: Autonomous Driving Pre-Training with Large-scale Point Cloud Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00612/) (2023)
- [BASICS: Broad quality Assessment of Static point clouds In Compression Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04796/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Novel Multi-layer Task-centric and Data Quality Framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17346/) (2025)
- [PRAM-R: A Perception-Reasoning-Action-Memory Framework with LLM-Guided Modality Routing for Adaptive Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04222/) (2026)
- [Modeling and Measuring Redundancy in Multisource Multimodal Data for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06544/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LiDAR is one of the most crucial sensors for autonomous vehicle perception. However, current LiDAR-based point cloud perception algorithms lack comprehensive and rigorous LiDAR quality assessment methods, leading to uncertainty in detection performance. Additionally, existing point cloud quality assessment algorithms are predominantly designed for indoor environments or single-object scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel image-guided point cloud quality assessment algorithm for outdoor autonomous driving environments, named the Image-Guided Outdoor Point Cloud Quality Assessment (IGO-PQA) algorithm. Our proposed algorithm comprises two main components. The first component is the IGO-PQA generation algorithm, which leverages point cloud data, corresponding RGB surrounding view images, and agent objects' ground truth annotations to generate an overall quality score for a single-frame LiDAR-based point cloud. The second component is a transformer-based IGO-PQA regression algorithm for no-reference outdoor point cloud quality assessment. This regression algorithm allows for the direct prediction of IGO-PQA scores in an online manner, without requiring image data and object ground truth annotations. We evaluate our proposed algorithm using the nuScenes and Waymo open datasets. The IGO-PQA generation algorithm provides consistent and reasonable perception quality indices. Furthermore, our proposed IGO-PQA regression algorithm achieves a Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) of 0.86 on the nuScenes dataset and 0.97 on the Waymo dataset.