Refining Ground Truth Poses in Autonomous Driving Datasets via Neural Rendering

Abstract

Public autonomous driving datasets underpin the training and benchmarking of perception, mapping, and localization algorithms, yet residual inaccuracies in sensor calibration and ego-poses can silently degrade both model performance and evaluation reliability. We introduce MOISST++, a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based pipeline that jointly refines extrinsic sensor calibration and continuous-time ego-trajectories at dataset scale. The method optimizes shared rig parameters across multiple subsequences and corrects per-subsequence trajectories via a learned continuous-time correction, going beyond prior work that targets individual scenes. We validate pose improvements without ground truth through a complementary evaluation suite combining Structure from Motion (SfM) triangulation, novel view synthesis, and multi-modal geometric consistency metrics, verify their coherence via cross-metric agreement, and confirm their sensitivity through a controlled-perturbation study with known injected errors. Applied to four major datasets (KITTI-360, nuScenes, PandaSet, and Waymo), MOISST++ yields statistically significant improvements on most metrics on nuScenes, PandaSet and Waymo, and marginal, within-noise changes on the already well-calibrated KITTI-360. We publicly release the optimized poses and calibration parameters, together with our evaluation code, to support more reliable research and benchmarking.

Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026