UBTECH Sydney Artificial Intelligence Centre（优必选悉尼人工智能中心）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
Despite rapid developments in visual image-based road detection, robustly identifying road areas in visual images remains challenging due to issues like illumination changes and blurry images. To this end, LiDAR sensor data can be incorporated to improve the visual image-based road detection, because LiDAR data is less susceptible to visual noises. However, the main difficulty in introducing LiDAR information into visual image-based road detection is that LiDAR data and its extracted features do not share the same space with the visual data and visual features. Such gaps in spaces may limit the benefits of LiDAR information for road detection. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel Progressive LiDAR Adaptation-aided Road Detection (PLARD) approach to adapt LiDAR information into visual image-based road detection and improve detection performance. In PLARD, progressive LiDAR adaptation consists of two subsequent modules: 1) data space adaptation, which transforms the LiDAR data to the visual data space to align with the perspective view by applying altitude difference-based transformation; and 2) feature space adaptation, which adapts LiDAR features to visual features through a cascaded fusion structure. Comprehensive empirical studies on the well-known KITTI road detection benchmark demonstrate that PLARD takes advantage of both the visual and LiDAR information, achieving much more robust road detection even in challenging urban scenes. In particular, PLARD outperforms other state-of-the-art road detection models and is currently top of the publicly accessible benchmark leader-board.
HeuDiaSyc（HeuDiaSyc实验室）；Université de technologie de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Renault S.A.S（雷诺公司）
LIDAR sensors are usually used to provide autonomous vehicles with 3D representations of their environment. In ideal conditions, geometrical models could detect the road in LIDAR scans, at the cost of a manual tuning of numerical constraints, and a lack of flexibility. We instead propose an evidential pipeline, to accumulate road detection results obtained from neural networks. First, we introduce RoadSeg, a new convolutional architecture that is optimized for road detection in LIDAR scans. RoadSeg is used to classify individual LIDAR points as either belonging to the road, or not. Yet, such p…
RS2AD-LiDAR: End-to-End Autonomous Driving LiDAR Data Generation from Roadside Sensor Observations
State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility（智能绿色车辆与移动国家重点实验室）；School of Vehicle and Mobility（车辆与移动学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；Logic & Silicon AI Studio；School of Instrumentation and Optoelectronic Engineering（仪器科学与光电工程学院）
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Autoliv Research（奥托立夫研究院）
In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road detection using only LIDAR data. Starting from an unstructured point cloud, top-view images encoding several basic statistics such as mean elevation and density are generated. By considering a top-view representation, road detection is reduced to a single-scale problem that can be addressed with a simple and fast fully convolutional neural network (FCN). The FCN is specifically designed for the task of pixel-wise semantic segmentation by combining a large receptive field with high-resolution feature maps. The proposed …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Sensor-based environmental perception is a crucial part of the autonomous driving system. In order to get an excellent perception of the surrounding environment, an intelligent system would configure multiple LiDARs (3D Light Detection and Ranging) to cover the distant and near space of the car. The precision of perception relies on the quality of sensor calibration. This research aims at developing an accurate, automatic, and robust calibration strategy for multiple LiDAR systems in the general road scene. We thus propose CROON (automatiC multi-LiDAR CalibratiOn and Refinement method in rOad …
Automatic extraction of road curbs from uneven, unorganized, noisy and massive 3D point clouds is a challenging task. Existing methods often project 3D point clouds onto 2D planes to extract curbs. However, the projection causes loss of 3D information which degrades the performance of the detection. This paper presents a robust, accurate and efficient method to extract road curbs from 3D mobile LiDAR point clouds. Our method consists of two steps: 1) extracting the candidate points of curbs based on the proposed novel energy function and 2) refining the candidate points using the proposed leas…
This work aims to address the challenges in autonomous driving by focusing on the 3D perception of the environment using roadside LiDARs. We design a 3D object detection model that can detect traffic participants in roadside LiDARs in real-time. Our model uses an existing 3D detector as a baseline and improves its accuracy. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed modules, we train and evaluate the model on three different vehicle and infrastructure datasets. To show the domain adaptation ability of our detector, we train it on an infrastructure dataset from China and perform transfer learni…
Peking University（北京大学）；China North Vehicle Research Institute（中国北方车辆研究所）
We propose a method for off-road drivable area extraction using 3D LiDAR data with the goal of autonomous driving application. A specific deep learning framework is designed to deal with the ambiguous area, which is one of the main challenges in the off-road environment. To reduce the considerable demand for human-annotated data for network training, we utilize the information from vast quantities of vehicle paths and auto-generated obstacle labels. Using these autogenerated annotations, the proposed network can be trained using weakly supervised or semi-supervised methods, which can achieve b…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；AB Volvo（沃尔沃集团）
Recent advances in the field of machine learning and computer vision have enabled the development of fast and accurate road detectors. Commonly such systems are trained within a supervised learning paradigm where both an input sensor's data and the corresponding ground truth label must be provided. The task of generating labels is commonly carried out by human annotators and it is notoriously time consuming and expensive. In this work, it is shown that a semi-supervised approach known as co-training can provide significant F1-score average improvements compared to supervised learning. In co-tr…
LiDARDustX: A LiDAR Dataset for Dusty Unstructured Road Environments
Wuxi Intelligent Control Research Institute,HNU（无锡智能控制研究院，湖南大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学）
In this paper, we address semantic segmentation of road-objects from 3D LiDAR point clouds. In particular, we wish to detect and categorize instances of interest, such as cars, pedestrians and cyclists. We formulate this problem as a point- wise classification problem, and propose an end-to-end pipeline called SqueezeSeg based on convolutional neural networks (CNN): the CNN takes a transformed LiDAR point cloud as input and directly outputs a point-wise label map, which is then refined by a conditional random field (CRF) implemented as a recurrent layer. Instance-level labels are then obtained…
A Fully Interpretable Statistical Approach for Roadside LiDAR Background Subtraction
Fundación Vicomtech, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（维克森科技基金会、巴斯克研究与技术联盟）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克国家大学）；CAFSignalling（CAF信号公司）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（伊基尔巴斯克基金会）；Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC)（多诺西亚国际物理中心）；Biofisika Institute（生物物理研究所）
In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road detection by fusing LIDAR point clouds and camera images. An unstructured and sparse point cloud is first projected onto the camera image plane and then upsampled to obtain a set of dense 2D images encoding spatial information. Several fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) are then trained to carry out road detection, either by using data from a single sensor, or by using three fusion strategies: early, late, and the newly proposed cross fusion. Whereas in the former two fusion approaches, the integration of multi…
Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Robust road segmentation is a key challenge in self-driving research. Though many image-based methods have been studied and high performances in dataset evaluations have been reported, developing robust and reliable road segmentation is still a major challenge. Data fusion across different sensors to improve the performance of road segmentation is widely considered an important and irreplaceable solution. In this paper, we propose a novel structure to fuse image and LiDAR point cloud in an end-to-end semantic segmentation network, in which the fusion is performed at decoder stage instead of at…
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；DZYNE Technologies（DZYNE科技公司）
Roadway free-flow speed captures the typical vehicle speed in low traffic conditions. Modeling free-flow speed is an important problem in transportation engineering with applications to a variety of design, operation, planning, and policy decisions of highway systems. Unfortunately, collecting large-scale historical traffic speed data is expensive and time consuming. Traditional approaches for estimating free-flow speed use geometric properties of the underlying road segment, such as grade, curvature, lane width, lateral clearance and access point density, but for many roads such features are …
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Intellifusion（云天励飞）
Road detection is a critically important task for self-driving cars. By employing LiDAR data, recent works have significantly improved the accuracy of road detection. Relying on LiDAR sensors limits the wide application of those methods when only cameras are available. In this paper, we propose a novel road detection approach with RGB being the only input during inference. Specifically, we exploit pseudo-LiDAR using depth estimation, and propose a feature fusion network where RGB and learned depth information are fused for improved road detection. To further optimize the network structure and …
This paper presents a framework for the targetless extrinsic calibration of stereo cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors with a non-overlapping Field of View (FOV). In order to solve the extrinsic calibrations problem under such challenging configuration, the proposed solution exploits road markings as static and robust features among the various dynamic objects that are present in urban environment. First, this study utilizes road markings that are commonly captured by the two sensor modalities to select informative images for estimating the extrinsic parameters. In order to…
In this paper, we introduce a deep encoder-decoder network, named SalsaNet, for efficient semantic segmentation of 3D LiDAR point clouds. SalsaNet segments the road, i.e. drivable free-space, and vehicles in the scene by employing the Bird-Eye-View (BEV) image projection of the point cloud. To overcome the lack of annotated point cloud data, in particular for the road segments, we introduce an auto-labeling process which transfers automatically generated labels from the camera to LiDAR. We also explore the role of imagelike projection of LiDAR data in semantic segmentation by comparing BEV wit…
Center for Mathematical Morphology (CMM) - MINES ParisTech - PSL Research University（数学形态学中心（CMM）- 巴黎高等矿业学院 - PSL研究大学）；NavyaTech（Navya科技公司）；Terra3D（Terra3D公司）
Point cloud datasets for perception tasks in the context of autonomous driving often rely on high resolution 64-layer Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) scanners. They are expensive to deploy on real-world autonomous driving sensor architectures which usually employ 16/32 layer LIDARs. We evaluate the effect of subsampling image based representations of dense point clouds on the accuracy of the road segmentation task. In our experiments the low resolution 16/32 layer LIDAR point clouds are simulated by subsampling the original 64 layer data, for subsequent transformation in to a feature map i…
For autonomous vehicles, an accurate calibration for LiDAR and camera is a prerequisite for multi-sensor perception systems. However, existing calibration techniques require either a complicated setting with various calibration targets, or an initial calibration provided beforehand, which greatly impedes their applicability in large-scale autonomous vehicle deployment. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel method to calibrate the extrinsic parameter for LiDAR and camera in road scenes. Our method introduces line features from static straight-line-shaped objects such as road lanes and pole…
Earlier work demonstrates the promise of deep-learning-based approaches for point cloud segmentation; however, these approaches need to be improved to be practically useful. To this end, we introduce a new model SqueezeSegV2 that is more robust to dropout noise in LiDAR point clouds. With improved model structure, training loss, batch normalization and additional input channel, SqueezeSegV2 achieves significant accuracy improvement when trained on real data. Training models for point cloud segmentation requires large amounts of labeled point-cloud data, which is expensive to obtain. To sideste…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
Detecting dynamic objects and predicting static road information such as drivable areas and ground heights are crucial for safe autonomous driving. Previous works studied each perception task separately, and lacked a collective quantitative analysis. In this work, we show that it is possible to perform all perception tasks via a simple and efficient multi-task network. Our proposed network, LidarMTL, takes raw LiDAR point cloud as inputs, and predicts six perception outputs for 3D object detection and road understanding. The network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with 3D sparse co…
University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Toyota North America R&D Labs（丰田北美研发实验室）
3D object detection plays a fundamental role in enabling autonomous driving, which is regarded as the significant key to unlocking the bottleneck of contemporary transportation systems from the perspectives of safety, mobility, and sustainability. Most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods from point clouds are developed based on a single onboard LiDAR, whose performance will be inevitably limited by the range and occlusion, especially in dense traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textit{PillarGrid}, a novel cooperative perception method fusing information from multi…
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯大学，新泽西州立大学）
In this paper, we developed the solution of roadside LiDAR object detection using a combination of two unsupervised learning algorithms. The 3D point clouds are firstly converted into spherical coordinates and filled into the elevation-azimuth matrix using a hash function. After that, the raw LiDAR data were rearranged into new data structures to store the information of range, azimuth, and intensity. Then, the Dynamic Mode Decomposition method is applied to decompose the LiDAR data into low-rank backgrounds and sparse foregrounds based on intensity channel pattern recognition. The Coarse Fine…
Dense Road Surface Grip Map Prediction from Multimodal Image Data
Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, National Land Survey of Finland（芬兰地理空间研究所（FGI），芬兰国家土地测量局）；Department of Computer Science, Aalto University（阿尔托大学计算机科学系）
ROD: RGB-Only Fast and Efficient Off-road Freespace Detection
Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（智能计算系统研究室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Astronomical Computing Research Center, Zhejiang Lab（天文计算研究室，浙江实验室）；Beijing Special Vehicle Academy（北京特种车辆学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（计算机科学与技术学院，中国科学院大学）
Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, National Land Survey of Finland（芬兰国家土地调查局芬兰地理空间研究所（FGI））；Aalto University School of Science（阿尔托大学理学院）
Autonomous driving is challenging in adverse road and weather conditions in which there might not be lane lines, the road might be covered in snow and the visibility might be poor. We extend the previous work on end-to-end learning for autonomous steering to operate in these adverse real-life conditions with multimodal data. We collected 28 hours of driving data in several road and weather conditions and trained convolutional neural networks to predict the car steering wheel angle from front-facing color camera images and lidar range and reflectance data. We compared the CNN model performances…
Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI)（牛津机器人研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Road boundaries, or curbs, provide autonomous vehicles with essential information when interpreting road scenes and generating behaviour plans. Although curbs convey important information, they are difficult to detect in complex urban environments (in particular in comparison to other elements of the road such as traffic signs and road markings). These difficulties arise from occlusions by other traffic participants as well as changing lighting and/or weather conditions. Moreover, road boundaries have various shapes, colours and structures while motion planning algorithms require accurate and …
Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）；UiT the Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学（特罗姆瑟大学））
It is important, but challenging, for the forest industry to accurately map roads which are used for timber transport by trucks. In this work, we propose a Dense Dilated Convolutions Merging Network (DDCM-Net) to detect these roads in lidar images. The DDCM-Net can effectively recognize multi-scale and complex shaped roads with similar texture and colors, and also is shown to have superior performance over existing methods. To further improve its ability to accurately infer categories of roads, we propose the use of a joint-task learning strategy that utilizes two auxiliary output branches, i.…
RS2AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving Data Generation from Roadside Sensor Observations
School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与移动系统学院）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学智能绿色车辆与移动系统国家重点实验室）；School of Instrumentation and Optoelectronic Engineering, BeiHang University（北航仪器与光电工程学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Freespace detection is an essential component of autonomous driving technology and plays an important role in trajectory planning. In the last decade, deep learning-based free space detection methods have been proved feasible. However, these efforts were focused on urban road environments and few deep learning-based methods were specifically designed for off-road free space detection due to the lack of off-road benchmarks. In this paper, we present the ORFD dataset, which, to our knowledge, is the first off-road free space detection dataset. The dataset was collected in different scenes (woodl…
