MR-LiDAR: A Multi-Resolution Roadside LiDAR Benchmark for Perception Diagnostics and Deployment Guidance
Authors: Shunlai Cui, Peng Cao, Yuan Zhu, Yongjiang He, Jiacheng Yin, Xiao Huo, Gang Cao, Xiaobo Liu
Abstract
LiDAR model selection is a critical issue in roadside sensing systems, as it directly determines both perception capability and deployment cost. However, the lack of empirical benchmarks for comparing perception performance across different LiDAR configurations has greatly constrained scientific sensor selection and deployment planning. To address this gap, we present MR-LiDAR, a controlled multi-resolution LiDAR benchmark for roadside perception diagnostics. Using 16-, 32-, 80-, and 128-beam LiDARs in identical roadside scenarios, we collect point clouds and ground-truth annotations for diverse traffic participants, including vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs), across varying distances. This controlled design isolates intrinsic LiDAR specifications, particularly beam count and beam distribution, as the key variables for precise performance diagnostics. Based on MR-LiDAR, we conduct systematic empirical analyses to examine how beam count, beam distribution, target distance, object category, and vehicle occlusion affect LiDAR perception performance. The results reveal that all of these factors have substantial impacts. In particular, contrary to the common assumption that higher beam counts always yield better perception, we show that an 80-beam LiDAR with optimized beam distribution can match or even outperform a 128-beam LiDAR with uniform beam distribution. In addition, we provide a practical reference guide for LiDAR selection, including target point-count statistics and detection performance comparisons based on two widely used detection algorithms. This work offers a diagnostic benchmark and practical guidance for determining cost-effective LiDAR configurations in roadside perception applications.
Autonomous driving perception is typically evaluated on clean benchmark data, yet real-world deployment requires robustness to rare, structured, and potentially adversarial sensor anomalies. This gap is especially critical for LiDAR, where external actors can physically manipulate the sensing process to induce black-box perception failures without accessing the model. Existing LiDAR benchmarks provide little visibility into this failure mode. Prior adversarial LiDAR studies have largely centered on attack hardware, geometric and algorithmic defenses, and early-generation detectors, leaving the robustness of modern perception systems unexplored. To address this evaluation gap, we introduce ATLAS (Adversarial Temporal LiDAR Attack Suite), the first large-scale, physically grounded evaluation benchmark for LiDAR perception models under black-box sensor attacks, simulating the two primary attack modes -- point injection and point removal -- across real driving sequences. Evaluating a broad cross-section of current state-of-the-art LiDAR perception models, ATLAS reveals a surprising robustness asymmetry: models with stronger performance on standard benchmarks tend to better withstand removal attacks, yet are actually more vulnerable to injection attacks than weaker models. We trace this vulnerability to standard object database sampling augmentations, revealing how current training practices can induce architecture-agnostic robustness failures, and study initial directions for mitigating both attack modes. We release the ATLAS generation code to support extensible, reproducible evaluations as attack capabilities evolve, helping make black-box sensor robustness an explicit consideration in future LiDAR perception development.
LiDAR has increasingly been integrated into traffic cameras to expand coverage and mitigate occlusion in roadside cooperative perception. However, how unimodal and camera-LiDAR fusion architectures behave under variations in LiDAR point sparsity induced by sensor configurations and scene-dependent sensing conditions remains underexplored. We introduce RESOLVE, a large-scale real-world benchmark dataset featuring multi-resolution roadside LiDAR and synchronized camera-LiDAR sensing for systematic evaluation of unimodal and fusion-based architectures in roadside 3D detection and tracking. RESOLVE contains over 100k images and 26k point cloud frames with 220k manually annotated bounding boxes, captured at a real-world urban intersection across diverse lighting and weather conditions and spanning 10 classes of traffic participants. In particular, RESOLVE enables controlled evaluation across three LiDAR resolution levels while keeping all other sensing and environmental factors fixed. This allows fair cross-architecture comparisons under point cloud distribution shifts resulting from resolution variations, sensing distance, and training-inference resolution mismatches. Results from extensive benchmark experiments reveal insights into how multimodal fusion can compensate for LiDAR point sparsity, offering clues for designing cost-efficient roadside multimodal perception. The dataset and benchmark codes are available at https://github.com/ASU-Suo-Lab/RESOLVE.
Perception in dense, unstructured urban traffic remains a major challenge for autonomous driving because of the wide variety of road users, frequent occlusions, irregular motion patterns, and the lack of standardized road layouts. Although recent LiDAR based 3D object detectors have shown strong performance in structured driving scenarios, most are developed and evaluated for limited field of view settings, and their behavior under full surround 360-degree sensing is still not well understood. This paper studies a 360-degree LiDAR perception pipeline for autonomous driving, with particular attention to panoramic sensing, azimuthal sector wise spatial processing, and transformation equivariant feature extraction in complex urban scenes. The paper presents a practical 360-degree perception framework that combines sector wise panoramic processing with rotation equivariant sparse convolutions and evaluates its behavior on a custom Ouster OS0 LiDAR dataset collected across diverse Indian urban traffic conditions. The results show generally stable detection across several object classes, with the strongest performance for cars at 92.02/90.51, buses at 80.53/76.34, and trucks at 78.59/74.16, while lower scores for pedestrians at 67.45/61.02, cyclists at 73.21/69.54, and motorcyclists at 71.20/68.13 reflect the greater difficulty of detecting smaller and more variable road users in dense urban scenes.
Pranav Darshan, Raghuveer Narayanan Rajesh, M Uttara Kumari