Ground plane estimation and ground point segmentation is a crucial precursor for many applications in robotics and intelligent vehicles like navigable space detection and occupancy grid generation, 3D object detection, point cloud matching for localization and registration for mapping. In this paper, we present GndNet, a novel end-to-end approach that estimates the ground plane elevation information in a grid-based representation and segments the ground points simultaneously in real-time. GndNet uses PointNet and Pillar Feature Encoding network to extract features and regresses ground height for each cell of the grid. We augment the SemanticKITTI dataset to train our network. We demonstrate qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our results for ground elevation estimation and semantic segmentation of point cloud. GndNet establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieves a run-time of 55Hz for ground plane estimation and ground point segmentation.
Semantic grids can be useful representations of the scene around an autonomous system. By having information about the layout of the space around itself, a robot can leverage this type of representation for crucial tasks such as navigation or tracking. By fusing information from multiple sensors, robustness can be increased and the computational load for the task can be lowered, achieving real time performance. Our multi-scale LiDAR-Aided Perspective Transform network uses information available in point clouds to guide the projection of image features to a top-view representation, resulting in a relative improvement in the state of the art for semantic grid generation for human (+8.67%) and movable object (+49.07%) classes in the nuScenes dataset, as well as achieving results close to the state of the art for the vehicle, drivable area and walkway classes, while performing inference at 25 FPS.
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