Home > Published Issues > 2025 > Volume 16, No. 2, 2025 >
JAIT 2025 Vol.16(2): 223-232
doi: 10.12720/jait.16.2.223-232

LiDAR Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation: A Statistical Intensity Model

Pablo Aguilar-Pérez 1,2,* and Rebeca P. Díaz-Redondo 1,*
1. atlanTTic Research Center, Information & Computing Lab. Telecommunication Engineering School, Universidade de Vigo. Vigo, 36310, Spain
2. Centro Tecnológico de Automoción de Galicia, Avenida Principal, 2, 36475 O Porriño, Pontevedra, Spain
Email: pablo.aguilar@uvigo.gal (P.A); rebeca@det.uvigo.es (R.D.)
*Corresponding author

Manuscript received August 23, 2024; revised September 26, 2024; accepted November 12, 2024; published February 17, 2025.

Abstract—Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors play a crucial role in autonomous driving, specially in HDMaps generation systems, which contain semantic information of the road scenarios. Gathering this information is not easy, so in the literature deep learning-based semantic segmentation on LiDAR point clouds is used to accelerate this process. However, it requires large amounts of data for training, which are time-consuming and computationally intensive to obtain. In this paper, we introduce a method to use the synthetic dataset KITTI-CARLA to reduce the amount of real data needed to train a Deep Learning-based model on SemanticKITTI. The main challenge is that in KITTI-CARLA the intensity field is not computed. To overcome this, we define a statistic module that infer the real distribution of intensities of SemanticKITTI into KITTI-CARLA. We tested our method with the Point-to-Voxel-KD model. Extensive experiments show that results near the state of the art can be obtained with half the amount of real data when KITTI-CARLA is incorporated to the training set. The source code for the intensity distribution calculation and the conversion process from KITTI-CARLA to SemanticKITTI is published in https://github.com/pabloaguilarp/KITTI-CARLA-converter.
 
Keywords—Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), deep learning, semantic segmentation, simulation

Cite: Pablo Aguilar-Pérez and Rebeca P. Díaz-Redondo, "LiDAR Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation: A Statistical Intensity Model," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 223-232, 2025. doi: 10.12720/jait.16.2.223-232

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

Article Metrics in Dimensions