Weather-Robust LiDAR Perception: Point Cloud Restoration from Adverse Weather

Abstract

Adverse weather conditions—such as rain, fog, and snow—significantly degrade LiDAR point cloud quality, causing substantial performance deterioration in detection models trained on clean data. To address this, we propose LTDNet, a novel point cloud quality improvement net-work that restores degraded LiDAR scans by learning an end-to-end mapping from corrupted to clean geometry. LTDNet leverages position encoding, spatial–frequency joint feature extraction, weather-aware refinement, and probabilistic pruning to effectively recover structural in-tegrity while suppressing weather-induced noise. To fa-cilitate standardized evaluation, we introduce IQA3D, a new benchmark comprising both synthetic and real-world sequences under adverse weather. This dual-design benchmark serves two complementary purposes: synthet-ic sequences provide pixel-wise correspondences between degraded and clean point clouds for quantitatively as-sessing restoration fidelity, while real-world sequences enable evaluation of the practical impact of improvement methods on downstream 3D object detection under au-thentic weather conditions. This makes IQA3D particular-ly suitable for jointly measuring both perceptual quality and task-level robustness of point cloud improvement models. Extensive experiments on IQA3D demonstrate that LTDNet significantly improves detection perfor-mance across various state-of-the-art 3D detectors and three tested weather conditions, making it a practical and effective solution for robust LiDAR-based detection.