{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quantifying-the-lidar-sim-to-real-domain","title":"Quantifying the LiDAR Sim-to-Real Domain Shift: A Detailed Investigation Using Object Detectors and Analyzing Point Clouds at Target-Level","arxiv_id":"2303.01899","date":"2023-03-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sebastian Huch","Luca Scalerandi","Esteban Rivera","Markus Lienkamp"],"abstract":"LiDAR object detection algorithms based on neural networks for autonomous driving require large amounts of data for training, validation, and testing. As real-world data collection and labeling are time-consuming and expensive, simulation-based synthetic data generation is a viable alternative. However, using simulated data for the training of neural networks leads to a domain shift of training and testing data due to differences in scenes, scenarios, and distributions. In this work, we quantify the sim-to-real domain shift by means of LiDAR object detectors trained with a new scenario-identical real-world and simulated dataset. In addition, we answer the questions of how well the simulated data resembles the real-world data and how well object detectors trained on simulated data perform on real-world data. Further, we analyze point clouds at the target-level by comparing real-world and simulated point clouds within the 3D bounding boxes of the targets. Our experiments show that a significant sim-to-real domain shift exists even for our scenario-identical datasets. This domain shift amounts to an average precision reduction of around 14 % for object detectors trained with simulated data. Additional experiments reveal that this domain shift can be lowered by introducing a simple noise model in simulation. We further show that a simple downsampling method to model real-world physics does not influence the performance of the object detectors.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01899v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01899v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantifying-the-lidar-sim-to-real-domain","repo_url":"https://github.com/tumftm/sim2realdistributionaligneddataset","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"autonomous-driving","task_name":"Autonomous Driving"},{"task_slug":"object","task_name":"Object"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"synthetic-data-generation","task_name":"Synthetic Data Generation"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}