Quantifying Data Augmentation for LiDAR based 3D Object Detection

In this work, we shed light on different data augmentation techniques commonly used in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) based 3D Object Detection. We, therefore, utilize a state of the art voxel-based 3D Object Detection pipeline called PointPillars and carry out our experiments on the well established KITTI dataset. We investigate a variety of global and local augmentation techniques, where global augmentation techniques are applied to the entire point cloud of a scene and local augmentation techniques are only applied to points belonging to individual objects in the scene. Our findings show that both types of data augmentation can lead to performance increases, but it also turns out, that some augmentation techniques, such as individual object translation, for example, can be counterproductive and can hurt overall performance. We show that when we apply our findings to the data augmentation policy of PointPillars we can easily increase its performance by up to 2%. In order to provide reproducibility, our code will be publicly available at www.trace.ethz.ch/3D_Object_Detection.