Method for Capturing Measured LiDAR Data with Ground Truth for Generation of Big Real LiDAR Data Sets

The development of machine learning has resulted in data gaining a pivotal role in the technological advancement, especially data where the ground truth of targeted parameters can be efficiently captured. This requires the development of methods that facilitate accurate data collection with ground truth. Under this perspective, Time of Flight sensors pose a high complexity due to the multifaceted nature of noise in the captured data. To enable the use of such sensors in a wide range of applications including Artificial Intelligence, we need to provide also accurate ground truth data. In this article, we present a method for automated data capturing from a LiDAR sensor together with ground truth data generation. This method will facilitate generating big datasets from LiDAR sensors with high accuracy ground truth data. In addition, we provide a dataset that aside from depth sensor data contains also RGB, confidence and infrared data captured from the LiDAR sensor. As a result, the proposed method not only facilitates data capturing but it enables to generate accurate ground truth data, with RMSE of only 0.04 m at 1.3 m distance.