LiDAR4D: Dynamic Neural Fields for Novel Space-time View LiDAR Synthesis
Authors: Zehan Zheng, Fan Lu, Weiyi Xue, Guang Chen, Changjun Jiang

Although neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have achieved triumphs in image novel view synthesis (NVS) LiDAR NVS remains largely unexplored. Previous LiDAR NVS methods employ a simple shift from image NVS methods while ignoring the dynamic nature and the large-scale reconstruction problem of LiDAR point clouds. In light of this we propose LiDAR4D a differentiable LiDAR-only framework for novel space-time LiDAR view synthesis. In consideration of the sparsity and large-scale characteristics we design a 4D hybrid representation combined with multi-planar and grid features to achieve effective reconstruction in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore we introduce geometric constraints derived from point clouds to improve temporal consistency. For the realistic synthesis of LiDAR point clouds we incorporate the global optimization of ray-drop probability to preserve cross-region patterns. Extensive experiments on KITTI-360 and NuScenes datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in accomplishing geometry-aware and time-consistent dynamic reconstruction. Codes are available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/LiDAR4D.