# Synth It Like KITTI: Synthetic Data Generation for Object Detection in Driving Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15076 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15076/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

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

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [ST3D++: Denoised Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06682/) (2021)
- [Uni3D: A Unified Baseline for Multi-dataset 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06880/) (2023)
- [Paris-CARLA-3D: A Real and Synthetic Outdoor Point Cloud Dataset for Challenging Tasks in 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11348/) (2021)
- [AmodalSynthDrive: A Synthetic Amodal Perception Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06547/) (2023)
- [Quantifying the LiDAR Sim-to-Real Domain Shift: A Detailed Investigation Using Object Detectors and Analyzing Point Clouds at Target-Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01899/) (2023)
- [A Realism Metric for Generated LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14958/) (2022)
- [ParisLuco3D: A high-quality target dataset for domain generalization of LiDAR perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16542/) (2023)
- [Multimodal 3D Object Detection from Simulated Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07754/) (2019)
- [GAN-Based LiDAR Intensity Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15415/) (2023)

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

- [Physically Based Neural LiDAR Resimulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12489/) (2025)
- [VERIA: Verification-Centric Multimodal Instance Augmentation for Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24294/) (2026)
- [Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Chinese Rural Scenes: An Experimental Study on Real-Synthetic Data Mixing and Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27058/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An important factor in advancing autonomous driving systems is simulation. Yet, there is rather small progress for transferability between the virtual and real world. We revisit this problem for 3D object detection on LiDAR point clouds and propose a dataset generation pipeline based on the CARLA simulator. Utilizing domain randomization strategies and careful modeling, we are able to train an object detector on the synthetic data and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities to the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, we compare different virtual sensor variants to gather insights, which sensor attributes can be responsible for the prevalent domain gap. Finally, fine-tuning with a small portion of real data almost matches the baseline and with the full training set slightly surpasses it.