Learning to Identify Out-of-Distribution Objects for 3D LiDAR Anomaly Segmentation

arXiv cs.RO / 4/28/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper tackles 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation by learning to distinguish known object classes from out-of-distribution objects, which is important for autonomous driving and robotic perception in real-world settings.
  • It proposes an efficient method that operates directly in feature space by modeling the inlier feature distribution, using this to constrain and detect anomalous samples.
  • The authors argue that prior 3D LiDAR anomaly research is limited because most work relies on 2D post-processing and because existing public datasets are small and too simple.
  • To address dataset limitations and a severe domain gap from sensor resolution, they introduce mixed real–synthetic 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation datasets with more diverse and complex scenes and multiple out-of-distribution objects.
  • Experiments show state-of-the-art and competitive performance on both the existing real-world dataset and the newly introduced mixed datasets, and the code/datasets are publicly available.

Abstract

Understanding the surrounding environment is fundamental in autonomous driving and robotic perception. Distinguishing between known classes and previously unseen objects is crucial in real-world environments, as done in Anomaly Segmentation. However, research in the 3D field remains limited, with most existing approaches applying post-processing techniques from 2D vision. To cover this lack, we propose a new efficient approach that directly operates in the feature space, modeling the feature distribution of inlier classes to constrain anomalous samples. Moreover, the only publicly available 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation dataset contains simple scenarios, with few anomaly instances, and exhibits a severe domain gap due to its sensor resolution. To bridge this gap, we introduce a set of mixed real-synthetic datasets for 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation, built upon established semantic segmentation benchmarks, with multiple out-of-distribution objects and diverse, complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art and competitive results on the existing real-world dataset and the newly introduced mixed datasets, respectively, validating the effectiveness of our method and the utility of the proposed datasets. Code and datasets are available at https://simom0.github.io/lido-page/.