LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that measures distance by emitting laser pulses and timing their return. It produces high-precision 3D measurements of the surrounding environment, which makes it a key sensor in autonomous driving, aerial mapping, forestry, and urban mapping.
LiDAR systems can be mounted on vehicles, drones, aircraft, or fixed platforms. They may use different scan designs such as rotating or solid-state.
The raw output of a LiDAR sensor is point cloud, which is a set of 3D points representing visible surfaces in the environment. 3D LiDAR annotation often means placing 3D cuboids or assigning point-level semantic labels to train perception models.
Example of lidar configurations on a self-driving car (Source: IDTechEx)
