LiDAR Perception in a Virtual Environment Using Deep Learning : A comparative study of state-of-the-art 3D object detection models on synthetic data

Abstract: Perceiving the environment is a crucial aspect of autonomous vehicles. To plan the route, the autonomous vehicle needs to be able to detect objects such as cars and pedestrians. This is possible through 3D object detection. However, labeling this type of data is time-consuming. By utilizing a virtual environment, there is an opportunity to generate data and label it in a quicker manner. This thesis aims to investigate how well three selected state-of-the-art models perform on a synthetic dataset of point cloud data. The results showed that the models attain a higher average precision compared to a dataset from the real world. This is mainly due to the virtual environment’s simplicity in relation to the real world’s detail. The results also suggest that models using different representations of point cloud data have different capabilities of transferring knowledge to the real world.