TripleMixer: A 3D Point Cloud Denoising Model for Adverse Weather

LiDAR sensors are crucial for providing high-resolution 3D point cloud data in autonomous driving systems, enabling precise environmental perception. However, real-world adverse weather conditions, such as rain, fog, and snow, introduce significant noise and interference, degrading the reliability of LiDAR data and the performance of downstream tasks like semantic segmentation. Existing datasets often suffer from limited weather diversity and small dataset sizes, which restrict their effectiveness in training models. Additionally, current deep learning denoising methods, while effective in certain scenarios, often lack interpretability, complicating the ability to understand and validate their decision-making processes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce two large-scale datasets, Weather-KITTI and Weather-NuScenes, which cover three common adverse weather conditions: rain, fog, and snow. These datasets retain the original LiDAR acquisition information and provide point-level semantic labels for rain, fog, and snow. Furthermore, we propose a novel point cloud denoising model, TripleMixer, comprising three mixer layers: the Geometry Mixer Layer, the Frequency Mixer Layer, and the Channel Mixer Layer. These layers are designed to capture geometric spatial information, extract multi-scale frequency information, and enhance the multi-channel feature information of point clouds, respectively. Experiments conducted on the WADS dataset in real-world scenarios, as well as on our proposed Weather-KITTI and Weather-NuScenes datasets, demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance. Additionally, our experiments show that integrating the denoising model into existing segmentation frameworks enhances the performance of downstream tasks.The datasets and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Grandzxw/TripleMixer.