Geometry vs Structure: Graph-Based Diagnostics for LiDAR Point-Cloud Simulation Fidelity

Digital twins provide a scalable and cost-effective complement to real-world testing for validating autonomous-driving and advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) sensor pipelines. However, quantifying their fidelity remains challenging, particularly for 3D LiDAR point clouds, where conventional geometric metrics may overlook important structural discrepancies. We present a graph-based framework for evaluating the structural fidelity of simulated LiDAR point clouds against real-world scans. While scan-level metrics such as Chamfer distance capture point-wise geometric similarity, they do not explicitly represent connectivity, topology, or object-level organization. Our framework constructs graphs from real and simulated point clouds, applies Louvain community detection to identify spatially coherent subgraphs, and matches corresponding communities using centroid proximity. For each matched pair, we compute rλ, a bounded graph-spectral metric motivated by Weyl's inequality, and compare it with density-aware Chamfer distance (CDC) as a geometric baseline. Controlled perturbation experiments demonstrate that rλ is invariant to rigid transformations and robust to sensor noise while remaining sensitive to structural deformation. We evaluate the framework on 50 paired real and simulated LiDAR scans acquired using a Velodyne VLP-32C sensor and CARLA, respectively. The dataset contains more than 1,000 matched communities across four representative classes: vehicles, vegetation, trees, and building walls. The results show that geometric and structural measures capture complementary aspects of simulation fidelity, supporting graph-spectral analysis as an additional diagnostic layer for validating digital twins in ADAS and autonomous-driving applications.