GANav: Group-wise Attention Network for Classifying Navigable Regions in Unstructured Outdoor Environments

Abstract

We present a new learning-based method for identifying safe and navigable regions in off-road terrains and unstructured environments from RGB images. Our approach consists of classifying groups of terrain classes based on their navigability levels using coarse-grained semantic segmentation. We propose a bottleneck transformer-based deep neural network architecture that uses a novel group-wise attention mechanism to distinguish between navigability levels of different terrains.Our group-wise attention heads enable the network to explicitly focus on the different groups and improve the accuracy. In addition, we propose a dynamic weighted cross entropy loss function to handle the long-tailed nature of the dataset. We show through extensive evaluations on the RUGD and RELLIS-3D datasets that our learning algorithm improves the accuracy of visual perception in off-road terrains for navigation. We compare our approach with prior work on these datasets and achieve an improvement over the state-of-the-art mIoU by 6.74-39.1% on RUGD and 3.82-10.64% on RELLIS-3D