UltraLiDAR: Learning Compact Representations for LiDAR Completion and
  Generation
Yuwen Xiong Wei-Chiu Ma Jingkang Wang Raquel Urtasun
LiDAR provides accurate geometric measurements of the 3D world.
Unfortunately, dense LiDARs are very expensive and the point clouds captured by
low-beam LiDAR are often sparse. To address these issues, we present
UltraLiDAR, a data-driven framework for scene-level LiDAR completion, LiDAR
generation, and LiDAR manipulation. The crux of UltraLiDAR is a compact,
discrete representation that encodes the point cloud's geometric structure, is
robust to noise, and is easy to manipulate. We show that by aligning the
representation of a sparse point cloud to that of a dense point cloud, we can
densify the sparse point clouds as if they were captured by a real high-density
LiDAR, drastically reducing the cost. Furthermore, by learning a prior over the
discrete codebook, we can generate diverse, realistic LiDAR point clouds for
self-driving. We evaluate the effectiveness of UltraLiDAR on sparse-to-dense
LiDAR completion and LiDAR generation. Experiments show that densifying
real-world point clouds with our approach can significantly improve the
performance of downstream perception systems. Compared to prior art on LiDAR
generation, our approach generates much more realistic point clouds. According
to A/B test, over 98.5\% of the time human participants prefer our results over
those of previous methods.