Disturbance and Particle Detection in LiDAR Data

The application of autonomous vehicles becomes more and more essential. LiDAR sensors play a significant role in environmental perception. However, rain-, fog-, snow- or dust particles disturb the point clouds and affect LiDAR-based map reconstruction and object detection algorithms. Widely scattered particles can be filtered using statistics. In contrast, dense fog or dust clouds are more challenging to deal with as it is difficult to distinguish them based on their statistics from parts of the environment. Literature provides numerous examples of particle filter applications. Still, the applicability in challenging environments as the off-road domain remains unclear. Therefore, this paper reviews and tests state-of-the-art particle filters on-and off-road scenes.