Detecting vehicles with strong robustness and high efficiency has become one of the key capabilities of fully autonomous driving cars. This topic has already been widely studied by GPU-accelerated deep learning approaches using image sensors and 3D LiDAR, however, few studies seek to address it with a horizontally mounted 2 @math laser scanner. 2 @math laser scanner is equipped on almost every autonomous vehicle for its superiorities in the field of view, lighting invariance, high accuracy and relatively low price. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient search-based L-Shape fitting algorithm for detecting positions and orientations of vehicles with a 2D laser scanner. Differing from the approach to formulating L-Shape fitting as a complex optimization problem, our method decomposes the L-Shape fitting into two steps: L-Shape vertexes searching and L-Shape corner localization. Our approach is computationally efficient due to its minimized complexity. In on-road experiments, our approach is capable of adapting to various circumstances with high efficiency and robustness.
Also some other approaches were developed using volumetric data with 3D LiDARs, among which some choose sequential projections of point clouds @cite_6 , @cite_9 , others choose to train up neural networks that can cope with unordered point cloud data with abstract feature learning, like in VoxelNet and PointNet. However, these approaches consume considerable computational resources and need a large-scale labeled data set for training, not to mention the sensors themselves are much more expensive than those for 2D ranging.
@cite_9 @cite_6
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3D LiDAR scanners are playing an increasingly important role in autonomous driving as they can generate depth information of the environment. However, creating large 3D LiDAR point cloud datasets with point-level labels requires a significant amount of manual annotation. This jeopardizes the efficient development of supervised deep learning algorithms which are often data-hungry. We present a framework to rapidly create point clouds with accurate point-level labels from a computer game. The framework supports data collection from both auto-driving scenes and user-configured scenes. Point clouds from auto-driving scenes can be used as training data for deep learning algorithms, while point clouds from user-configured scenes can be used to systematically test the vulnerability of a neural network, and use the falsifying examples to make the neural network more robust through retraining. In addition, the scene images can be captured simultaneously in order for sensor fusion tasks, with a method proposed to do automatic calibration between the point clouds and captured scene images. We show a significant improvement in accuracy (+9 ) in point cloud segmentation by augmenting the training dataset with the generated synthesized data. Our experiments also show by testing and retraining the network using point clouds from user-configured scenes, the weakness blind spots of the neural network can be fixed. Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR. Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR. 3D LiDAR scanners are playing an increasingly important role in autonomous driving as they can generate depth information of the environment. However, creating large 3D LiDAR point cloud datasets with point-level labels requires a significant amount of manual annotation. This jeopardizes the efficient development of supervised deep learning algorithms which are often data-hungry. We present a framework to rapidly create point clouds with accurate point-level labels from a computer game. To our best knowledge, this is the first publication on LiDAR point cloud simulation framework for autonomous driving. The framework supports data collection from both auto-driving scenes and user-configured scenes. Point clouds from auto-driving scenes can be used as training data for deep learning algorithms, while point clouds from user-configured scenes can be used to systematically test the vulnerability of a neural network, and use the falsifying examples to make the neural network more robust through retraining. In addition, the scene images can be captured simultaneously in order for sensor fusion tasks, with a method proposed to do automatic registration between the point clouds and captured scene images. We show a significant improvement in accuracy (+9 ) in point cloud segmentation by augmenting the training dataset with the generated synthesized data. Our experiments also show by testing and retraining the network using point clouds from user-configured scenes, the weakness blind spots of the neural network can be fixed.