SimULi: Real-Time LiDAR and Camera Simulation with Unscented Transforms

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Turki, Haithem, Wu, Qi, Kang, Xin, Esturo, Janick Martinez, Huang, Shengyu, Li, Ruilong, Gojcic, Zan, de Lutio, Riccardo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Turki, Haithem
Wu, Qi
Kang, Xin
Esturo, Janick Martinez
Huang, Shengyu
Li, Ruilong
Gojcic, Zan
de Lutio, Riccardo
author_facet Turki, Haithem
Wu, Qi
Kang, Xin
Esturo, Janick Martinez
Huang, Shengyu
Li, Ruilong
Gojcic, Zan
de Lutio, Riccardo
contents Rigorous testing of autonomous robots, such as self-driving vehicles, is essential to ensure their safety in real-world deployments. This requires building high-fidelity simulators to test scenarios beyond those that can be safely or exhaustively collected in the real-world. Existing neural rendering methods based on NeRF and 3DGS hold promise but suffer from low rendering speeds or can only render pinhole camera models, hindering their suitability to applications that commonly require high-distortion lenses and LiDAR data. Multi-sensor simulation poses additional challenges as existing methods handle cross-sensor inconsistencies by favoring the quality of one modality at the expense of others. To overcome these limitations, we propose SimULi, the first method capable of rendering arbitrary camera models and LiDAR data in real-time. Our method extends 3DGUT, which natively supports complex camera models, with LiDAR support, via an automated tiling strategy for arbitrary spinning LiDAR models and ray-based culling. To address cross-sensor inconsistencies, we design a factorized 3D Gaussian representation and anchoring strategy that reduces mean camera and depth error by up to 40% compared to existing methods. SimULi renders 10-20x faster than ray tracing approaches and 1.5-10x faster than prior rasterization-based work (and handles a wider range of camera models). When evaluated on two widely benchmarked autonomous driving datasets, SimULi matches or exceeds the fidelity of existing state-of-the-art methods across numerous camera and LiDAR metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimULi: Real-Time LiDAR and Camera Simulation with Unscented Transforms
Turki, Haithem
Wu, Qi
Kang, Xin
Esturo, Janick Martinez
Huang, Shengyu
Li, Ruilong
Gojcic, Zan
de Lutio, Riccardo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
Robotics
Rigorous testing of autonomous robots, such as self-driving vehicles, is essential to ensure their safety in real-world deployments. This requires building high-fidelity simulators to test scenarios beyond those that can be safely or exhaustively collected in the real-world. Existing neural rendering methods based on NeRF and 3DGS hold promise but suffer from low rendering speeds or can only render pinhole camera models, hindering their suitability to applications that commonly require high-distortion lenses and LiDAR data. Multi-sensor simulation poses additional challenges as existing methods handle cross-sensor inconsistencies by favoring the quality of one modality at the expense of others. To overcome these limitations, we propose SimULi, the first method capable of rendering arbitrary camera models and LiDAR data in real-time. Our method extends 3DGUT, which natively supports complex camera models, with LiDAR support, via an automated tiling strategy for arbitrary spinning LiDAR models and ray-based culling. To address cross-sensor inconsistencies, we design a factorized 3D Gaussian representation and anchoring strategy that reduces mean camera and depth error by up to 40% compared to existing methods. SimULi renders 10-20x faster than ray tracing approaches and 1.5-10x faster than prior rasterization-based work (and handles a wider range of camera models). When evaluated on two widely benchmarked autonomous driving datasets, SimULi matches or exceeds the fidelity of existing state-of-the-art methods across numerous camera and LiDAR metrics.
title SimULi: Real-Time LiDAR and Camera Simulation with Unscented Transforms
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12901