Quantifying the influence of rain in LiDAR performance

LiDAR systems emerge as one of the key systems for autonomous vehicles. The present work quantifies the influence of rain in different LiDAR parameters: range, intensity, and number of detected points. Six areas with different target materials are used for the study. Range measurements appear stable even under important rain affectation. The variations are always lower than 20 cm. These variations come from the experimental procedure (averaging of points detected from a surface) and not from the instabilities in the LiDAR detection with rain. The detected LiDAR intensity and the sampled points attenuate with the increasing of rain intensity. Drop size distribution is assumed constant along the study area. The highest decrease in the number of points appears for pavement. However, the intensity returned from pavement is not specially influenced by rain. The rest of the materials show similar trend in the intensity and the number of detected points.