Real-time mitigation of LiDAR mutual interference

Future automated vehicles are likely to rely on LiDAR sensors to perform automated functions. These LiDAR sensors have the potential to interfere with each other, with this mutual interference being represented by unwanted points in the point cloud. These points could affect the quality of perception of objects, such as potentially creating false objects or obscuring real objects. Hence, it is necessary to identify interference points and remove them from the point cloud, without removing points that belong to valid objects. This paper presents a novel LiDAR mutual interference mitigation algorithm that successfully mitigates interference and potentially can be performed in real time. The number of interference points when the victim and offending LiDARs were separated by 1m was reduced from over 1000 points to under 40 points. The proposed method performed better than the current state-of-the-art techniques on most metrics and was designed to ensure that consecutive points at the same range, such as those belonging to small objects at far distances, were not permanently removed from consecutive point clouds. These results ensure a removal of interference point without affecting the accuracy of perception tasks based on LiDAR data.