Hamed Haghighi

Yiting Wang, Tim Brödermann, Hamed Haghighi et al.

Robust depth completion is fundamental to real-world 3D scene understanding, yet existing RGB-LiDAR fusion methods degrade significantly under adverse weather, where both camera images and LiDAR measurements suffer from weather-induced corruption. In this paper, we introduce AURORA-KITTI, the first large-scale multi-modal, multi-weather benchmark for robust depth completion in the wild. We further formulate Depth Completion and Denoising (DCD) as a unified task that jointly reconstructs a dense depth map from corrupted sparse inputs while suppressing weather-induced noise. AURORA-KITTI contains over \textit{82K} weather-consistent RGBL pairs with metric depth ground truth, spanning diverse weather types, three severity levels, day and night scenes, paired clean references, lens occlusion conditions, and textual descriptions. Moreover, we introduce DDCD, an efficient distillation-based baseline that leverages depth foundation models to inject clean structural priors into in-the-wild DCD training. DDCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on AURORA-KITTI and the real-world DENSE dataset while maintaining efficiency. Notably, our results further show that weather-aware, physically consistent data contributes more to robustness than architectural modifications alone. Data and code will be released upon publication.

Hamed Haghighi, Amir Samadi, Mehrdad Dianati et al.

Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) results in the Lidar point cloud generation task, benefiting from their stable training and iterative refinement during sampling. However, DMs often fail to realistically model Lidar raydrop noise due to their inherent denoising process. To retain the strength of iterative sampling while enhancing the generation of raydrop noise, we introduce LidarGRIT, a generative model that uses auto-regressive transformers to iteratively sample the range images in the latent space rather than image space. Furthermore, LidarGRIT utilises VQ-VAE to separately decode range images and raydrop masks. Our results show that LidarGRIT achieves superior performance compared to SOTA models on KITTI-360 and KITTI odometry datasets. Code available at:https://github.com/hamedhaghighi/LidarGRIT.

Hamed Haghighi, Mehrdad Dianati, Valentina Donzella et al.

Simulation models for perception sensors are integral components of automotive simulators used for the virtual Verification and Validation (V\&V) of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). These models also serve as powerful tools for generating synthetic datasets to train deep learning-based perception models. Lidar is a widely used sensor type among the perception sensors for ADS due to its high precision in 3D environment scanning. However, developing realistic Lidar simulation models is a significant technical challenge. In particular, unrealistic models can result in a large gap between the synthesised and real-world point clouds, limiting their effectiveness in ADS applications. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as promising solutions to synthesise realistic sensory data. However, for Lidar simulation, deep generative models have been primarily hybridised with conventional algorithms, leaving unified generative approaches largely unexplored in the literature. Motivated by this research gap, we propose a unified generative framework to enhance Lidar simulation fidelity. Our proposed framework projects Lidar point clouds into depth-reflectance images via a lossless transformation, and employs our novel Controllable Lidar point cloud Generative model, CoLiGen, to translate the images. We extensively evaluate our CoLiGen model, comparing it with the state-of-the-art image-to-image translation models using various metrics to assess the realness, faithfulness, and performance of a downstream perception model. Our results show that CoLiGen exhibits superior performance across most metrics. The dataset and source code for this research are available at https://github.com/hamedhaghighi/CoLiGen.git.

Hamed Haghighi, Xiaomeng Wang, Hao Jing et al.

Perception sensors, particularly camera and Lidar, are key elements of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) that enable them to comprehend their surroundings to informed driving and control decisions. Therefore, developing realistic simulation models for these sensors is essential for conducting effective simulation-based testing of ADS. Moreover, the rise of deep learning-based perception models has increased the utility of sensor simulation models for synthesising diverse training datasets. The traditional sensor simulation models rely on computationally expensive physics-based algorithms, specifically in complex systems such as ADS. Hence, the current potential resides in data-driven approaches, fuelled by the exceptional performance of deep generative models in capturing high-dimensional data distribution and volume renderers in accurately representing scenes. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art data-driven camera and Lidar simulation models and their evaluation methods. It explores a spectrum of models from the novel perspective of generative models and volume renderers. Generative models are discussed in terms of their input-output types, while volume renderers are categorised based on their input encoding. Finally, the paper illustrates commonly used evaluation techniques for assessing sensor simulation models and highlights the existing research gaps in the area.

Abu Mohammed Raisuddin, Jesper Holmblad, Hamed Haghighi et al.

Sensor degradation poses a significant challenge in autonomous driving. During heavy rainfall, the interference from raindrops can adversely affect the quality of LiDAR point clouds, resulting in, for instance, inaccurate point measurements. This, in turn, can potentially lead to safety concerns if autonomous driving systems are not weather-aware, i.e., if they are unable to discern such changes. In this study, we release a new, large-scale, multi-modal emulated rain dataset, REHEARSE-3D, to promote research advancements in 3D point cloud de-raining. Distinct from the most relevant competitors, our dataset is unique in several respects. First, it is the largest point-wise annotated dataset, and second, it is the only one with high-resolution LiDAR data (LiDAR-256) enriched with 4D Radar point clouds logged in both daytime and nighttime conditions in a controlled weather environment. Furthermore, REHEARSE-3D involves rain-characteristic information, which is of significant value not only for sensor noise modeling but also for analyzing the impact of weather at a point level. Leveraging REHEARSE-3D, we benchmark raindrop detection and removal in fused LiDAR and 4D Radar point clouds. Our comprehensive study further evaluates the performance of various statistical and deep-learning models. Upon publication, the dataset and benchmark models will be made publicly available at: https://sporsho.github.io/REHEARSE3D.