4DLidarOpen: An Open 4D FMCW Lidar Dataset for Motion-Aware Autonomous Driving

Abstract

We present 4DLidarOpen, a large-scale open multi-modal dataset for autonomous driving, centered on 4D frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) Lidar sensing. Unlike conventional time-of-flight Lidar datasets that mainly provide geometric measurements, 4DLidarOpen includes point-wise radial velocity measurements from a forward-facing 4D FMCW Lidar, together with multiple Lidars of different types, including rotating, solid-state, and blind-spot variants, surround-view cameras, and 6-DOF ego-vehicle poses. The dataset was collected in complex urban environments in Beijing and covers dense pedestrian interactions, congested traffic, high-speed driving, and unprotected maneuvers. 4DLidarOpen provides synchronized multi-sensor data and 3D bounding-box annotations with persistent track IDs across five object categories. A hybrid annotation strategy is adopted, where large-scale auto-labeled data support scalable training and human experts refine annotations for the human-annotated training and validation sets. Based on this dataset, we establish benchmarks for 3D object detection, birds-eye view (BEV) segmentation and flow prediction, and motion forecasting with planning. Extensive experiments show that direct velocity measurements from 4D FMCW Lidar provide complementary motion cues for dynamic-scene understanding. Compared with geometric-only sensing, the velocity-aware representation improves motion-related perception and downstream forecasting and planning, especially in scenarios involving vulnerable road users and fast-moving objects. These results indicate that 4D FMCW Lidar is a promising sensing modality for motion-aware autonomous driving. The dataset and evaluation toolkit are publicly released to support research on 4D scene understanding, multi-Lidar fusion, and velocity-aware perception and planning.