Beyond the Snowflakes: Disentangling Weather Effects from Confounding Meta-Factors in LiDAR Object Detection

Abstract

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is critical for autonomous perception, yet its performance is known to degrade in adverse weather. While existing literature models snow as atmospheric noise that degrades performance, our granular evaluation on the WADS-3D and CADC datasets reveals a counter-intuitive phenomenon: detection accuracy consistently improves as snow intensity increases. Through ablation study and meta-information analysis, we reconcile this by confirming that while falling snow acts as noise, its negative impact is outweighed by a dominant, concurrent factor: significantly increased object point count. We hypothesize that this object point count boost acts as a geometric enhancement, driven by snow accumulation increasing vehicle surface area and a shift from specular to diffuse reflectance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluating perception systems using broad weather-severity bins without accounting for correlated object-level data can lead to misleading conclusions about detector robustness. We conclude that accurate evaluation requires decoupling atmospheric noise from surface accumulation effects and outline future research to validate these physical models. The WADS-3D dataset is available at: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/wads-3d/.