GS-LiDAR: Generating Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds with Panoramic Gaussian Splatting

LiDAR novel view synthesis (NVS) has emerged as a novel task within LiDAR simulation, offering valuable simulated point cloud data from novel viewpoints to aid in autonomous driving systems. However, existing LiDAR NVS methods typically rely on neural radiance fields (NeRF) as their 3D representation, which incurs significant computational costs in both training and rendering. Moreover, NeRF and its variants are designed for symmetrical scenes, making them ill-suited for driving scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose GS-LiDAR, a novel framework for generating realistic LiDAR point clouds with panoramic Gaussian splatting. Our approach employs 2D Gaussian primitives with periodic vibration properties, allowing for precise geometric reconstruction of both static and dynamic elements in driving scenarios. We further introduce a novel panoramic rendering technique with explicit ray-splat intersection, guided by panoramic LiDAR supervision. By incorporating intensity and ray-drop spherical harmonic (SH) coefficients into the Gaussian primitives, we enhance the realism of the rendered point clouds. Extensive experiments on KITTI-360 and nuScenes demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of quantitative metrics, visual quality, as well as training and rendering efficiency.