3,099 research outputs found
Deep Lidar CNN to Understand the Dynamics of Moving Vehicles
Perception technologies in Autonomous Driving are experiencing their golden
age due to the advances in Deep Learning. Yet, most of these systems rely on
the semantically rich information of RGB images. Deep Learning solutions
applied to the data of other sensors typically mounted on autonomous cars (e.g.
lidars or radars) are not explored much. In this paper we propose a novel
solution to understand the dynamics of moving vehicles of the scene from only
lidar information. The main challenge of this problem stems from the fact that
we need to disambiguate the proprio-motion of the 'observer' vehicle from that
of the external 'observed' vehicles. For this purpose, we devise a CNN
architecture which at testing time is fed with pairs of consecutive lidar
scans. However, in order to properly learn the parameters of this network,
during training we introduce a series of so-called pretext tasks which also
leverage on image data. These tasks include semantic information about
vehicleness and a novel lidar-flow feature which combines standard image-based
optical flow with lidar scans. We obtain very promising results and show that
including distilled image information only during training, allows improving
the inference results of the network at test time, even when image data is no
longer used.Comment: Presented in IEEE ICRA 2018. IEEE Copyrights: Personal use of this
material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other
uses. (V2 just corrected comments on arxiv submission
Hallucinating dense optical flow from sparse lidar for autonomous vehicles
© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper we propose a novel approach to estimate dense optical flow from sparse lidar data acquired on an autonomous vehicle. This is intended to be used as a drop-in replacement of any image-based optical flow system when images are not reliable due to e.g. adverse weather conditions or at night. In order to infer high resolution 2D flows from discrete range data we devise a three-block architecture of multiscale filters that combines multiple intermediate objectives, both in the lidar and image domain. To train this network we introduce a dataset with approximately 20K lidar samples of the Kitti dataset which we have augmented with a pseudo ground-truth image-based optical flow computed using FlowNet2. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on Kitti, and show that despite using the low-resolution and sparse measurements of the lidar, we can regress dense optical flow maps which are at par with those estimated with image-based methods.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
CNN for Very Fast Ground Segmentation in Velodyne LiDAR Data
This paper presents a novel method for ground segmentation in Velodyne point
clouds. We propose an encoding of sparse 3D data from the Velodyne sensor
suitable for training a convolutional neural network (CNN). This general
purpose approach is used for segmentation of the sparse point cloud into ground
and non-ground points. The LiDAR data are represented as a multi-channel 2D
signal where the horizontal axis corresponds to the rotation angle and the
vertical axis the indexes channels (i.e. laser beams). Multiple topologies of
relatively shallow CNNs (i.e. 3-5 convolutional layers) are trained and
evaluated using a manually annotated dataset we prepared. The results show
significant improvement of performance over the state-of-the-art method by
Zhang et al. in terms of speed and also minor improvements in terms of
accuracy.Comment: ICRA 2018 submissio
LIDAR-based Driving Path Generation Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
In this work, a novel learning-based approach has been developed to generate
driving paths by integrating LIDAR point clouds, GPS-IMU information, and
Google driving directions. The system is based on a fully convolutional neural
network that jointly learns to carry out perception and path generation from
real-world driving sequences and that is trained using automatically generated
training examples. Several combinations of input data were tested in order to
assess the performance gain provided by specific information modalities. The
fully convolutional neural network trained using all the available sensors
together with driving directions achieved the best MaxF score of 88.13% when
considering a region of interest of 60x60 meters. By considering a smaller
region of interest, the agreement between predicted paths and ground-truth
increased to 92.60%. The positive results obtained in this work indicate that
the proposed system may help fill the gap between low-level scene parsing and
behavior-reflex approaches by generating outputs that are close to vehicle
control and at the same time human-interpretable.Comment: Changed title, formerly "Simultaneous Perception and Path Generation
Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
Fast LIDAR-based Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
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 system achieved excellent
performance and it is among the top-performing algorithms on the KITTI road
benchmark. Its fast inference makes it particularly suitable for real-time
applications
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