Research on LiDAR point cloud data transformation method based on weighted altitude difference map

• Published in: Frontiers in physics 2024-06, Vol.12
• Main Authors: Wang, Bosi, Long, Zourong, Chen, Xinhai, Feng, Chenjun, Zhao, Min, Sun, Dihua, Wang, Weiping, Wang, Shihao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: convolutional neural nets; data fusion; image processing; road vehicles; semantic segmentation
• ISSN: 2296-424X; 2296-424X
• DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2024.1387717

Road surface detection plays a pivotal role in the realm of autonomous vehicle navigation. Contemporary methodologies primarily leverage LiDAR for acquiring three-dimensional data and utilize imagery for chromatic information. However, these approaches encounter significant integration challenges, particularly due to the inherently unstructured nature of 3D point clouds. Addressing this, our novel algorithm, specifically tailored for predicting drivable areas, synergistically combines LiDAR point clouds with bidimensional imagery. Initially, it constructs an altitude discrepancy map via LiDAR, capitalizing on the height uniformity characteristic of planar road surfaces. Subsequently, we introduce an innovative and more efficacious attention mechanism, streamlined for image feature extraction. This mechanism employs adaptive weighting coefficients for the amalgamation of the altitude disparity imagery and two-dimensional image features, thereby facilitating road area delineation within a semantic segmentation framework. Empirical evaluations conducted using the KITTI dataset underscore our methodology’s superior road surface discernment and extraction precision, substantiating the efficacy of our proposed network architecture and data processing paradigms. This research endeavor seeks to propel the advancement of three-dimensional perception technology in the autonomous driving domain.