Awesome LIDAR 
A curated list of awesome LIDAR sensors and its applications.
LIDAR is a remote
sensing sensor that uses laser light to measure the surroundings in ~cm
accuracy. The sensory data is usually referred as point cloud which
means set of data points in 3D or 2D. The list contains hardwares,
datasets, point cloud-processing algorithms, point cloud frameworks,
simulators etc.
Contributions are welcome! Please check
out our guidelines.
[!TIP] An optional view: trackawesomelist.com/szenergy/awesome-lidar
Contents
Conventions
- Any list item with
badge has a GitHub repo or organization
- Any list item with
badge has YouTube videos or channel
- Any list item with
badge has a scientific paper or detailed description
- Any list item with
badge is ROS 2
compatible
Manufacturers
- Velodyne - Ouster and
Velodyne announced the successful completion of their merger of
equals, effective February 10, 2023. Velodyne was a mechanical and
solid-state LIDAR manufacturer. The headquarter is in San Jose,
California, USA.
- Ouster - LIDAR manufacturer,
specializing in digital-spinning LiDARs. Ouster is headquartered in San
Francisco, USA.
- Livox - LIDAR manufacturer.
- SICK - Sensor and
automation manufacturer, the headquarter is located in Waldkirch,
Germany.
- Hokuyo - Sensor and
automation manufacturer, headquartered in Osaka, Japan.
- Pioneer
- LIDAR manufacturer, specializing in MEMS mirror-based raster scanning
LiDARs (3D-LiDAR). Pioneer is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
- Luminar - LIDAR
manufacturer focusing on compact, auto-grade sensors. Luminar is
headquartered Palo Alto, California, USA.
- Hesai - Hesai Technology is
a LIDAR manufacturer, founded in Shanghai, China.
- Robosense - RoboSense (Suteng
Innovation Technology Co., Ltd.) is a LIDAR sensor, AI algorithm and IC
chipset maufactuirer based in Shenzhen and Beijing (China).
- LSLIDAR - LSLiDAR (Leishen
Intelligent System Co., Ltd.) is a LIDAR sensor manufacturer and
complete solution provider based in Shenzhen, China.
- Ibeo - Ibeo Automotive
Systems GmbH is an automotive industry / environmental detection
laserscanner / LIDAR manufacturer, based in Hamburg, Germany.
- Innoviz - Innoviz technologies /
specializes in solid-state LIDARs.
- Quanenergy - Quanenergy Systems
/ solid-state and mechanical LIDAR sensors / offers End-to-End solutions
in Mapping, Industrial Automation, Transportation and Security. The
headquarter is located in Sunnyvale, California, USA.
- Cepton - Cepton
(Cepton Technologies, Inc.) / pioneers in frictionless, and mirrorless
design, self-developed MMT (micro motion technology) lidar technology.
The headquarter is located in San Jose, California, USA.
- Blickfeld - Blickfeld is a
solid-state LIDAR manufacturer for autonomous mobility and IoT, based in
München, Germany.
- Neuvition - Neuvition is a
solid-state LIDAR manufacturer based in Wujiang, China.
- Aeva - Aeva is bringing the next
wave of perception technology to all devices for automated driving,
consumer electronics, health, industrial robotics and security, Mountain
View, California, USA.
- XenomatiX - XenomatiX
offers true solid-state lidar sensors based on a multi-beam lasers
concept. XenomatiX is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium.
- MicroVision - A pioneer in
MEMS-based laser beam scanning technology, the main focus is on building
Automotive grade Lidar sensors, located in Hamburg, Germany.
- PreAct - PreAct’s mission
is to make life safer and more efficient for the automotive industry and
beyond. The headquarter is located in Portland, Oregon, USA.
- Pepperl+Fuchs - Is a
global technology company, specialized in innovative automation
solutions and sensor technologies, such as LiDAR, based in Mannheim,
Germany.
Datasets
- Ford Dataset - The dataset is
time-stamped and contains raw data from all the sensors, calibration
values, pose trajectory, ground truth pose, and 3D maps. The data is
Robot Operating System (ROS) compatible.
- Audi A2D2 Dataset - The dataset
features 2D semantic segmentation, 3D point clouds, 3D bounding boxes,
and vehicle bus data.
- Waymo Open Dataset - The
dataset contains independently-generated labels for lidar and camera
data, not simply projections.
- Oxford
RobotCar - The Oxford RobotCar Dataset contains over 100 repetitions
of a consistent route through Oxford, UK, captured over a period of over
a year.
- EU
Long-term Dataset - This dataset was collected with our robocar (in
human driving mode of course), equipped up to eleven heterogeneous
sensors, in the downtown (for long-term data) and a suburb (for
roundabout data) of Montbéliard in France. The vehicle speed was limited
to 50 km/h following the French traffic rules.
- NuScenes - Public
large-scale dataset for autonomous driving.
- Lyft - Public dataset
collected by a fleet of Ford Fusion vehicles equipped with LIDAR and
camera.
- KITTI -
Widespread public dataset, pirmarily focusing on computer vision
applications, but also contains LIDAR point cloud.
- Semantic KITTI - Dataset
for semantic and panoptic scene segmentation.
- CADC - Canadian Adverse Driving
Conditions Dataset - Public large-scale dataset for autonomous
driving in adverse weather conditions (snowy weather).
- UofTPed50
Dataset - University of Toronto, aUToronto’s self-driving car
dataset, which contains GPS/IMU, 3D LIDAR, and Monocular camera data. It
can be used for 3D pedestrian detection.
- PandaSet Open
Dataset - Public large-scale dataset for autonomous driving provided
by Hesai & Scale. It enables researchers to study challenging urban
driving situations using the full sensor suit of a real
self-driving-car.
- Cirrus
dataset A public datatset from non-uniform distribution of LIDAR
scanning patterns with emphasis on long range. In this dataset Luminar
Hydra LIDAR is used. The dataset is available at the Volvo Cars
Innovation Portal.
- USyd
Dataset- The Univerisity of Sydney Campus- Dataset - Long-term,
large-scale dataset collected over the period of 1.5 years on a weekly
basis over the University of Sydney campus and surrounds. It includes
multiple sensor modalities and covers various environmental conditions.
ROS compatible
- Brno
Urban Dataset
- Navigation and localisation dataset for self driving cars and
autonomous robots in Brno, Czechia.
- Argoverse
- A dataset designed to support autonomous vehicle perception tasks
including 3D tracking and motion forecasting collected in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania and Miami, Florida, USA.
- Boreas Dataset -
The Boreas dataset was collected by driving a repeated route over the
course of 1 year resulting in stark seasonal variations. In total,
Boreas contains over 350km of driving data including several sequences
with adverse weather conditions such as rain and heavy snow. The Boreas
data-taking platform features a unique high-quality sensor suite with a
128-channel Velodyne Alpha Prime lidar, a 360-degree Navtech radar, and
accurate ground truth poses obtained from an Applanix POSLV GPS/IMU.
Libraries
- Point Cloud Library (PCL)
- Popular highly parallel programming library, with numerous industrial
and research use-cases.
- Open3D library -
Open3D library contanins 3D data processing and visualization
algorithms. It is open-source and supports both C++ and Python.
- PyTorch Geometric
- A geometric deep learning extension library for PyTorch.
- PyTorch3d - PyTorch3d is a
library for deep learning with 3D data written and maintained by the
Facebook AI Research Computer Vision Team.
- Kaolin -
Kaolin is a PyTorch Library for Accelerating 3D Deep Learning Research
written by NVIDIA Technologies for game and application developers.
- PyVista - 3D plotting and
mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization
Toolkit.
- pyntcloud
- Pyntcloud is a Python 3 library for working with 3D point clouds
leveraging the power of the Python scientific stack.
- pointcloudset
- Python library for efficient analysis of large datasets of point
clouds recorded over time.
- LAStools - C++ library
and command-line tools for pointcloud processing and data compressing.
Frameworks
- Autoware - Popular framework
in academic and research applications of autonomous vehicles.
- Baidu Apollo - Apollo is a
popular framework which accelerates the development, testing, and
deployment of Autonomous Vehicles.
- ALFA
Framework
- An open-source framework for developing processing algorithms, with a
focus on embedded platforms and hardware acceleration.
Algorithms
Basic matching algorithms
- Iterative
closest point (ICP)
- The must-have algorithm for feature matching applications (ICP).
- GitHub repository
- simpleICP C++ /Julia / Matlab / Octave / Python implementation.
- GitHub
repository
- libpointmatcher, a modular library implementing the ICP
algorithm.
- Paper
- libpointmatcher: Comparing ICP variants on real-world data sets.
- Normal
distributions transform
- More recent massively-parallel approach to feature matching
(NDT).
- KISS-ICP
- In Defense of Point-to-Point ICP – Simple, Accurate, and Robust
Registration If Done the Right Way.
Semantic segmentation
- RangeNet++
- Fast and Accurate LiDAR Sematnic Segmentation with fully convolutional
network.
- PolarNet
- An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic
Segmentation.
- Frustum PointNets
- Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data.
- Study of LIDAR
Semantic Segmentation - Scan-based Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR
Point Clouds: An Experimental Study IV 2020.
- LIDAR-MOS
- Moving Object Segmentation in 3D LIDAR Data
- SuperPoint Graph -
Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs
- SuperPoint
Transformer -
Efficient 3D Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Transformer
- RandLA-Net
- Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds
- Automatic labelling
- Automatic labelling of urban point clouds using data fusion
Ground segmentation
- Plane Seg
- ROS comapatible ground plane segmentation; a library for fitting
planes to LIDAR.
- LineFit
Graph -
Line fitting-based fast ground segmentation for horizontal 3D LiDAR data
- Patchwork -
Region-wise plane fitting-based robust and fast ground segmentation for
3D LiDAR data
- Patchwork++ -
Improved version of Patchwork. Patchwork++ provides pybinding as well
for deep learning users
Simultaneous
localization and mapping SLAM and LIDAR-based odometry and or mapping
LOAM
- LOAM J. Zhang and S. Singh
- LOAM: Lidar Odometry and Mapping in Real-time.
- LeGO-LOAM
- A lightweight and ground optimized lidar odometry and mapping
(LeGO-LOAM) system for ROS compatible UGVs.
- Cartographer
- Cartographer is ROS compatible system that provides real-time
simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D across
multiple platforms and sensor configurations.
- SuMa++
- LiDAR-based Semantic SLAM.
- OverlapNet
- Loop Closing for LiDAR-based SLAM.
- LIO-SAM
- Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping.
- Removert
- Remove, then Revert: Static Point cloud Map Construction using
Multiresolution Range Images.
- RESPLE
- Recursive Spline Estimation for LiDAR-Based Odometry
Object detection and
object tracking
- Learning to Optimally
Segment Point Clouds
- By Peiyun Hu, David Held, and Deva Ramanan at Carnegie Mellon
University. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2020.
- Leveraging
Heteroscedastic Aleatoric Uncertainties for Robust Real-Time LiDAR 3D
Object Detection
- By Di Feng, Lars Rosenbaum, Fabian Timm, Klaus Dietmayer. 30th IEEE
Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2019.
- What You See is What
You Get: Exploiting Visibility for 3D Object Detection
- By Peiyun Hu, Jason Ziglar, David Held, Deva Ramanan, 2019.
- urban_road_filter -
Real-Time LIDAR-Based Urban Road and Sidewalk Detection for Autonomous
Vehicles
- detection_by_tracker
- 3D-LIDAR Multi Object Tracking for Autonomous Driving: Multi-target
Detection and Tracking under Urban Road Uncertainties, also used in
Autoware Universe
LIDAR-other-sensor
calibration
Simulators
- CoppeliaSim -
Cross-platform general-purpose robotic simulator (formerly known as
V-REP).
- OSRF Gazebo - OGRE-based
general-purpose robotic simulator, ROS/ROS 2 compatible.
- CARLA - Unreal Engine based
simulator for automotive applications. Compatible with Autoware, Baidu
Apollo and ROS/ROS 2.
- LGSVL / SVL - Unity
Engine based simulator for automotive applications. Compatible with
Autoware, Baidu Apollo and ROS/ROS 2. Note: LG has made the
difficult decision to suspend
active development of SVL Simulator.
- OSSDC SIM - Unity
Engine based simulator for automotive applications, based on the
suspended LGSVL simulator, but an active development. Compatible with
Autoware, Baidu Apollo and ROS/ROS 2.
- AirSim - Unreal
Engine based simulator for drones and automotive. Compatible with ROS.
- AWSIM - Unity Engine
based simulator for automotive applications. Compatible with Autoware
and ROS 2.
Others
- ARHeadsetKit -
Using $5 Google Cardboard to replicate Microsoft Hololens. Hosts the
source code for research on scene
color reconstruction.
- Pointcloudprinter
- A tool to turn point cloud data from aerial lidar scans into solid
meshes for 3D printing.
- CloudCompare - CloudCompare
is a free, cross-platform point cloud editor software.
- Pcx
- Point cloud importer/renderer for Unity.
- Bpy
- Point cloud importer/renderer/editor for Blender, Point Cloud
visualizer.
- Semantic
Segmentation Editor
- Point cloud and image semantic segmentation editor by Hitachi
Automotive And Industry Laboratory, point cloud annotator /
labeling.
- 3D Bounding Box
Annotation Tool
- 3D BAT: A Semi-Automatic, Web-based 3D Annotation Toolbox for
Full-Surround, Multi-Modal Data Streams, point cloud annotator /
labeling.
- Photogrammetry
importer
- Blender addon to import reconstruction results of several
libraries.
- Foxglove - Foxglove Studio is an
integrated visualization and diagnosis tool for robotics, available in
your browser or for download as a desktop app on Linux, Windows, and
macOS.
- MeshLab - MeshLab is an open
source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing
3D triangular meshes and pointcloud.
- CloudPeek is a
lightweight, c++ single-header, cross-platform point cloud viewer,
designed for simplicity and efficiency without relying on heavy external
libraries like PCL or Open3D.
lidar.md
Github