LiDAR Point Cloud Image-based Generation Using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to revolutionize transportation by improving efficiency and safety. Their success relies on 3D vision systems that effectively sense the environment and detect traffic agents. Among sensors AVs use to create a comprehensive view of surroundings, LiDAR provides high-resolution depth data enabling accurate object detection, safe navigation, and collision avoidance. However, collecting real-world LiDAR data is time-consuming and often affected by noise and sparsity due to adverse weather or sensor limitations. This work applies a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), enhanced with novel noise scheduling and time-step embedding techniques to generate high-quality synthetic data for augmentation, thereby improving performance across a range of computer vision tasks, particularly in AV perception. These modifications impact the denoising process and the model's temporal awareness, allowing it to produce more realistic point clouds based on the projection. The proposed method was extensively evaluated under various configurations using the IAMCV and KITTI-360 datasets, with four performance metrics compared against state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The results demonstrate the model's superior performance over most existing baselines and its effectiveness in mitigating the effects of noisy and sparse LiDAR data, producing diverse point clouds with rich spatial relationships and structural detail.