LiDAR data augmentation by interpolation on spherical range image

LiDAR sensors are used for mapping tasks, LiDAR odometry or 3D environment reconstruction. Several of them count with a high number of vertical layers, which increase their price and prevents research groups from carrying out experiments and scientific advances. In this paper, we propose a method for augmenting point cloud data by bilinear interpolation in a Spherical Range Image. Our method improves others on the state-of-the-art by means of standard deviation filtering of the newly generated layers. The system operates at a frequency greater than 10 Hz for data interpolation up to 20 times. In addition, we present two applications for our approach such as LiDAR odometry and LiDAR-Camera fusion, obtaining better results than others that do not apply data augmentation. Finally we make available to the scientific community a package development on ROS (Robot Operating System). The code is available at https://github.com/EPVelasco/lidar-camera-fusion