WeatherGen: A Unified Diverse Weather Generator for LiDAR Point Clouds via Spider Mamba Diffusion
This work addresses the high cost of LiDAR data collection for autonomous systems in adverse weather, offering a novel simulation method that is not incremental but provides a unified solution for multiple weather types.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating diverse adverse-weather LiDAR data for 3D scene perception by introducing WeatherGen, a diffusion-based framework that significantly improves fidelity and enables the creation of a mini-weather dataset to enhance downstream task performance.
3D scene perception demands a large amount of adverse-weather LiDAR data, yet the cost of LiDAR data collection presents a significant scaling-up challenge. To this end, a series of LiDAR simulators have been proposed. Yet, they can only simulate a single adverse weather with a single physical model, and the fidelity of the generated data is quite limited. This paper presents WeatherGen, the first unified diverse-weather LiDAR data diffusion generation framework, significantly improving fidelity. Specifically, we first design a map-based data producer, which can provide a vast amount of high-quality diverse-weather data for training purposes. Then, we utilize the diffusion-denoising paradigm to construct a diffusion model. Among them, we propose a spider mamba generator to restore the disturbed diverse weather data gradually. The spider mamba models the feature interactions by scanning the LiDAR beam circle or central ray, excellently maintaining the physical structure of the LiDAR data. Subsequently, following the generator to transfer real-world knowledge, we design a latent feature aligner. Afterward, we devise a contrastive learning-based controller, which equips weather control signals with compact semantic knowledge through language supervision, guiding the diffusion model to generate more discriminative data. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the high generation quality of WeatherGen. Through WeatherGen, we construct the mini-weather dataset, promoting the performance of the downstream task under adverse weather conditions. Code is available: https://github.com/wuyang98/weathergen