In this paper, we present LiDAR-Net, a new real-scanned indoor point cloud dataset, containing nearly 3.6 billion precisely point-level annotated points, covering an expansive area of 30,000m2. It encompasses three prevalent daily environments, including learning scenes, working scenes, and living scenes. LiDAR-Net is characterized by its non-uniform point distribution, e.g., scanning holes and scanning lines. Additionally, it meticulously records and an-notates scanning anomalies, including reflection noise and ghost. These anomalies stem from specular reflections on glass or metal, as well as distortions due to moving persons. LiDAR-Net's realistic representation of non-uniform distribution and anomalies significantly enhances the training of deep learning models, leading to improved generalization in practical applications. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on LiDAR-Net and provide a detailed analysis of the results. Crucially, our research identifies several fundamental challenges in understanding indoor point clouds, contributing essential insights to future explorations in this field. Our dataset can be found online: http://lidar-net.njumeta.com.

The prohibitive cost of annotations for fully supervised 3D indoor object detection limits its practicality. In this work, we propose Random Prompt Assisted Weakly-supervised 3D Object Detection, termed as Prompt3D, a weakly-supervised approach that leverages position-level labels to overcome this challenge. Explicitly, our method focuses on enhancing labeling using synthetic scenes crafted from 3D shapes generated via random prompts. First, a Synthetic Scene Generation (SSG) module is introduced to assemble synthetic scenes with a curated collection of 3D shapes, created via random prompts for each category. These scenes are enriched with automatically generated point-level annotations, providing a robust supervisory frame-work for training the detection algorithm. To enhance the transfer of knowledge from virtual to real datasets, we then introduce a Prototypical Proposal Feature Alignment (PPFA) module. This module effectively alleviates the domain gap by directly minimizing the distance between feature prototypes of the same class proposals across two domains. Compared with sota BR, our method improves by 5.4% and 8.7% on mAP with VoteNet and GroupFree3D serving as detectors respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/huishengye/prompt3d.