TauLiM: Test Data Augmentation of LiDAR Point Cloud by Metamorphic Relation

With the rapid development of object detection in deep learning (DL), applications on LiDAR point clouds have received much attention, such as autonomous driving. To verify the robustness of object detection models by testing, large amounts of diversifted annotated LiDAR point clouds are required to be used as test data. However, considering the sparseness of objects, the diversity of the existing point cloud dataset is limited by the number and types of objects. Therefore, it is important to generate diversifted point clouds by test data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a tool for LiDAR point cloud via test data augmentation, named TauLiM. A well-designed metamorphic relation (MR) [1] is proposed to augment point clouds while maintaining their physical characteristic of LiDAR. TauLiM is composed of three modules, namely point cloud configuration, coordinate filtering, and object insertion. To evaluate our tool, we employ experiments to compare the ability of testing between the existing dataset and the augmented one. The result shows that TauLiM can effectively augment diversified test data and test the object detection model. The video of TauLiM is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S6xpRbbhtQ and TauLiM can be used at http://1.13.193.98:2601/.