FOR: Point Cloud Outlier Removal Based on Fuzzy Theory and Informativeness and Its Application to 3D Object Detection

LiDAR is widely used in autonomous driving. Although LiDAR point cloud data can provide stable and reliable information about the environment, it also faces the problem of a huge amount of data. One of the reasons is that point cloud data contains a large amount of noise and outliers. Outlier removal of point clouds can reduce the impact of these disturbances and improve the quality of the point cloud, but it will inevitably eliminate some valid points, which affects subsequent perception tasks. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a fuzzy outlier removal (FOR) method based on fuzzy theory and informativeness. It uses fuzzy theory to model the uncertainty of the membership degree of each point in each dimension, calculates the informativeness sum of each point based on membership degree, and filters points according to the informativeness. FOR is characterized by filtering the point cloud in the edge region on the premise of retaining the point cloud in the center region, so as to preserve the environmental information in the center region and reduce the impact of outlier removal on subsequent perception tasks. The experiments focus on the contradictory relationship between outlier removal and perception accuracy, and verify the effectiveness of FOR with multiple object detection models on the autonomous driving datasets KITTI and nuScenes. The experimental results indicate that, compared with other point cloud outlier removal methods, FOR has the advantage of reducing inference time while retaining detection accuracy, demonstrating balanced high performance across different datasets and detection models.