Niklas Knoop

Richard Marcus, Niklas Knoop, Bernhard Egger et al.

Virtual testing is a crucial task to ensure safety in autonomous driving, and sensor simulation is an important task in this domain. Most current LiDAR simulations are very simplistic and are mainly used to perform initial tests, while the majority of insights are gathered on the road. In this paper, we propose a lightweight approach for more realistic LiDAR simulation that learns a real sensor's behavior from test drive data and transforms this to the virtual domain. The central idea is to cast the simulation into an image-to-image translation problem. We train our pix2pix based architecture on two real world data sets, namely the popular KITTI data set and the Audi Autonomous Driving Dataset which provide both, RGB and LiDAR images. We apply this network on synthetic renderings and show that it generalizes sufficiently from real images to simulated images. This strategy enables to skip the sensor-specific, expensive and complex LiDAR physics simulation in our synthetic world and avoids oversimplification and a large domain-gap through the clean synthetic environment.

Richard Marcus, Felix Gabel, Niklas Knoop et al.

Realistic vehicle sensor simulation is an important element in developing autonomous driving. As physics-based implementations of visual sensors like LiDAR are complex in practice, data-based approaches promise solutions. Using pairs of camera images and LiDAR scans from real test drives, GANs can be trained to translate between them. For this process, we contribute two additions. First, we exploit the camera images, acquiring segmentation data and dense depth maps as additional input for training. Second, we test the performance of the LiDAR simulation by testing how well an object detection network generalizes between real and synthetic point clouds to enable evaluation without ground truth point clouds. Combining both, we simulate LiDAR point clouds and demonstrate their realism.