Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that uses laser light to measure distances and generate precise, three-dimensional information about the shape and characteristics of objects and surfaces. Lidar systems are used in various applications, including mapping, surveying, autonomous vehicles, environmental monitoring, and geospatial analysis.

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LidaRF: Delving into Lidar for Neural Radiance Field on Street Scenes

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Photorealistic simulation plays a crucial role in applications such as autonomous driving, where advances in neural radiance fields (NeRFs) may allow better scalability through the automatic creation of digital 3D assets. However, reconstruction quality suffers on street scenes due to largely collinear camera motions and sparser samplings at higher speeds. On the other hand, the application often demands rendering from camera views that deviate from the inputs to accurately simulate behaviors like lane changes. In this paper, we propose several insights that allow a better utilization of Lidar data to improve NeRF quality on street scenes. First, our framework learns a geometric scene representation from Lidar, which are fused with the implicit grid-based representation for radiance decoding, thereby supplying strongergeometric information offered by explicit point cloud. Second, we put forth a robust occlusion-aware depth supervision scheme, which allows utilizing densified Lidar points by accumulation. Third, we generate augmented training views from Lidar points for further improvement. Our insights translate to largely improved novel view synthesis under real driving scenes.

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Mosaic: Leveraging Diverse Reflector Geometries for Omnidirectional Around-Corner Automotive Radar

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A large number of traffic collisions occur as a result of obstructed sight lines, such that even an advanced driver assistance system would be unable to prevent the crash. Recent work has proposed the use of around-the-corner radar systems to detect vehicles, pedestrians, and other road users in these occluded regions. Through comprehensive measurement, we show that these existing techniques cannot sense occluded moving objects in many important real-world scenarios. To solve this problem of limited coverage, we leverage multiple, curved reflectors to provide comprehensive coverage over the most important locations near an intersection. In scenarios where curved reflectors are insufficient, we evaluate the relative benefits of using additional flat planar surfaces. Using these techniques, we more than double the probability of detecting a vehicle near the intersection in three real urban locations and enable NLoS radar sensing using an entirely new class of reflectors.

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SpaceBeam: LiDAR-Driven One-Shot mmWave Beam Management

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mmWave 5G networks promise to enable a new generation of networked applications requiring a combination of high throughput and ultra-low latency. However, in practice, mmWave performance scales poorly for large numbers of users due to the significant overhead required to manage the highly-directional beams. We find that we can substantially reduce or eliminate this overhead by using out-of-band infrared measurements of the surrounding environment generated by a LiDAR sensor. To accomplish this, we develop a ray-tracing system that is robust to noise and other artifacts from the infrared sensor, create a method to estimate the reflection strength from sensor data, and finally apply this information to the multiuser beam selection process. We demonstrate that this approach reduces beam-selection overhead by over 95% in indoor multi-user scenarios, reducing network latency by over 80% and increasing throughput by over 2× in mobile scenarios.

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