GAN-Based LiDAR Translation between Sunny and Adverse Weather for Autonomous Driving and Driving Simulation

Autonomous driving requires robust and highly accurate perception technologies. Various deep learning algorithms based on only image processing satisfy this requirement, but few such algorithms are based on LiDAR. However, images are only one part of the perceptible sensors in an autonomous driving vehicle; LiDAR is also essential for the recognition of driving environments. The main reason why there exist few deep learning algorithms based on LiDAR is a lack of data. Recent translation technology using generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been proposed to deal with this problem. However, these technologies focus on only image-to-image translation, although a lack of data occurs more often with LiDAR than with images. LiDAR translation technology is required not only for data augmentation, but also for driving simulation, which allows algorithms to practice driving as if they were commanding a real vehicle, before doing so in the real world. In other words, driving simulation is a key technology for evaluating and verifying algorithms which are practically applied to vehicles. In this paper, we propose a GAN-based LiDAR translation algorithm for autonomous driving and driving simulation. It is the first LiDAR translation approach that can deal with various types of weather that are based on an empirical approach. We tested the proposed method on the JARI data set, which was collected under various adverse weather scenarios with diverse precipitation and visible distance settings. The proposed method was also applied to the real-world Spain data set. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate realistic LiDAR data under adverse weather conditions.