Mind the Domain Gap: Measuring the Domain Gap Between Real-World and Synthetic Point Clouds for Automated Driving Development

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Duc, Nguyen, Lai, Yan-Ling, Madlindl, Patrick, Zhu, Xinyuan, Schwab, Benedikt, Wysocki, Olaf, Hoegner, Ludwig, Kolbe, Thomas H.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Duc, Nguyen
Lai, Yan-Ling
Madlindl, Patrick
Zhu, Xinyuan
Schwab, Benedikt
Wysocki, Olaf
Hoegner, Ludwig
Kolbe, Thomas H.
author_facet Duc, Nguyen
Lai, Yan-Ling
Madlindl, Patrick
Zhu, Xinyuan
Schwab, Benedikt
Wysocki, Olaf
Hoegner, Ludwig
Kolbe, Thomas H.
contents Owing to the typical long-tail data distribution issues, simulating domain-gap-free synthetic data is crucial in robotics, photogrammetry, and computer vision research. The fundamental challenge pertains to credibly measuring the difference between real and simulated data. Such a measure is vital for safety-critical applications, such as automated driving, where out-of-domain samples may impact a car's perception and cause fatal accidents. Previous work has commonly focused on simulating data on one scene and analyzing performance on a different, real-world scene, hampering the disjoint analysis of domain gap coming from networks' deficiencies, class definitions, and object representation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to measuring the domain gap between the real world sensor observations and simulated data representing the same location, enabling comprehensive domain gap analysis. To measure such a domain gap, we introduce a novel metric DoGSS-PCL and evaluation assessing the geometric and semantic quality of the simulated point cloud. Our experiments corroborate that the introduced approach can be used to measure the domain gap. The tests also reveal that synthetic semantic point clouds may be used for training deep neural networks, maintaining the performance at the 50/50 real-to-synthetic ratio. We strongly believe that this work will facilitate research on credible data simulation and allow for at-scale deployment in automated driving testing and digital twinning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17959
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mind the Domain Gap: Measuring the Domain Gap Between Real-World and Synthetic Point Clouds for Automated Driving Development
Duc, Nguyen
Lai, Yan-Ling
Madlindl, Patrick
Zhu, Xinyuan
Schwab, Benedikt
Wysocki, Olaf
Hoegner, Ludwig
Kolbe, Thomas H.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Owing to the typical long-tail data distribution issues, simulating domain-gap-free synthetic data is crucial in robotics, photogrammetry, and computer vision research. The fundamental challenge pertains to credibly measuring the difference between real and simulated data. Such a measure is vital for safety-critical applications, such as automated driving, where out-of-domain samples may impact a car's perception and cause fatal accidents. Previous work has commonly focused on simulating data on one scene and analyzing performance on a different, real-world scene, hampering the disjoint analysis of domain gap coming from networks' deficiencies, class definitions, and object representation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to measuring the domain gap between the real world sensor observations and simulated data representing the same location, enabling comprehensive domain gap analysis. To measure such a domain gap, we introduce a novel metric DoGSS-PCL and evaluation assessing the geometric and semantic quality of the simulated point cloud. Our experiments corroborate that the introduced approach can be used to measure the domain gap. The tests also reveal that synthetic semantic point clouds may be used for training deep neural networks, maintaining the performance at the 50/50 real-to-synthetic ratio. We strongly believe that this work will facilitate research on credible data simulation and allow for at-scale deployment in automated driving testing and digital twinning.
title Mind the Domain Gap: Measuring the Domain Gap Between Real-World and Synthetic Point Clouds for Automated Driving Development
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17959