Real-Aug: Realistic Scene Synthesis for LiDAR Augmentation in 3D Object Detection

Abstract: Data and model are the undoubtable two supporting pillars for LiDAR object detection. However, data-centric works have fallen far behind compared with the ever-growing list of fancy new models. In this work, we systematically study the synthesis-based LiDAR data augmentation approach (so-called GT-Aug) which offers maxium controllability over generated data samples. We pinpoint the main shortcoming of existing works is introducing unrealistic LiDAR scan patterns during GT-Aug. In light of this finding, we propose Real-Aug, a synthesis-based augmentation method which prioritizes on generating realistic LiDAR scans. Our method consists a reality-conforming scene composition module which handles the details of the composition and a real-synthesis mixing up training strategy which gradually adapts the data distribution from synthetic data to the real one. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we conduct extensive ablation studies and validate the proposed Real-Aug on a wide combination of detectors and datasets. We achieve a state-of-the-art 0.744 NDS and 0.702 mAP on nuScenes test set. The code shall be released soon.