Robust road segmentation is a key challenge in self-driving research. Though many image-based methods have been studied and high performances in dataset evaluations have been reported, developing robust and reliable road segmentation is still a major challenge. Data fusion across different sensors to improve the performance of road segmentation is widely considered an important and irreplaceable solution. In this paper, we propose a novel structure to fuse image and LiDAR point cloud in an end-to-end semantic segmentation network, in which the fusion is performed at decoder stage instead of at, more commonly, encoder stage. During fusion, we improve the multi-scale LiDAR map generation to increase the precision of the multi-scale LiDAR map by introducing pyramid projection method. Additionally, we adapted the multi-path refinement network with our fusion strategy and improve the road prediction compared with transpose convolution with skip layers. Our approach has been tested on KITTI ROAD dataset and has competitive performance.
for DNN based road segmentation. discussed different fusion strategies, named early fusion and late fusion @cite_15 . Last year, proposed a new fusion architecture name corss-fusion to directly learn from data where to integrate information by using trainable cross connections between the LIDAR and the camera processing branches @cite_33 . A siamese fusion method for road segmentation is also proposed to fuse LiDAR and camera informations @cite_37 . On road segmentation with camera and LiDAR fusion tasks, the only suitable dataset and benchmark, to our knowledge, is KITTI ROAD dataset @cite_46 . This dataset provide various sensor data collected on a real car with careful calibration. Due to above limitation, we will test our method using KITTI benchmark.
@cite_37 @cite_15 @cite_46 @cite_33
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Robust road detection is a key challenge in safe autonomous driving. Recently, with the rapid development of 3D sensors, more and more researchers are trying to fuse information across different sensors to improve the performance of road detection. Although many successful works have been achieved in this field, methods for data fusion under deep learning framework is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a Siamese deep neural network based on FCN-8s to detect road region. Our method uses data collected from a monocular color camera and a Velodyne-64 LiDAR sensor. We project the LiDAR point clouds onto the image plane to generate LiDAR images and feed them into one of the branches of the network. The RGB images are fed into another branch of our proposed network. The feature maps that these two branches extract in multiple scales are fused before each pooling layer, via padding additional fusion layers. Extensive experimental results on public dataset KITTI ROAD demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In this paper, we explore various aspects of fusing LIDAR and color imagery for pedestrian detection in the context of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have recently become state-of-art for many vision problems. We incorporate LIDAR by up-sampling the point cloud to a dense depth map and then extracting three features representing different aspects of the 3D scene. We then use those features as extra image channels. Specifically, we leverage recent work on HHA [9] (horizontal disparity, height above ground, and angle) representations, adapting the code to work on up-sampled LIDAR rather than Microsoft Kinect depth maps. We show, for the first time, that such a representation is applicable to up-sampled LIDAR data, despite its sparsity. Since CNNs learn a deep hierarchy of feature representations, we then explore the question: At what level of representation should we fuse this additional information with the original RGB image channels? We use the KITTI pedestrian detection dataset for our exploration. We first replicate the finding that region-CNNs (R-CNNs) [8] can outperform the original proposal mechanism using only RGB images, but only if fine-tuning is employed. Then, we show that: 1) using HHA features and RGB images performs better than RGB-only, even without any fine-tuning using large RGB web data, 2) fusing RGB and HHA achieves the strongest results if done late, but, under a parameter or computational budget, is best done at the early to middle layers of the hierarchical representation, which tend to represent midlevel features rather than low (e.g. edges) or high (e.g. object class decision) level features, 3) some of the less successful methods have the most parameters, indicating that increased classification accuracy is not simply a function of increased capacity in the neural network. Detecting the road area and ego-lane ahead of a vehicle is central to modern driver assistance systems. While lane-detection on well-marked roads is already available in modern vehicles, finding the boundaries of unmarked or weakly marked roads and lanes as they appear in inner-city and rural environments remains an unsolved problem due to the high variability in scene layout and illumination conditions, amongst others. While recent years have witnessed great interest in this subject, to date no commonly agreed upon benchmark exists, rendering a fair comparison amongst methods difficult. In this paper, we introduce a novel open-access dataset and benchmark for road area and ego-lane detection. Our dataset comprises 600 annotated training and test images of high variability from the KITTI autonomous driving project, capturing a broad spectrum of urban road scenes. For evaluation, we propose to use the 2D Bird's Eye View (BEV) space as vehicle control usually happens in this 2D world, requiring detection results to be represented in this very same space. Furthermore, we propose a novel, behavior-based metric which judges the utility of the extracted ego-lane area for driver assistance applications by fitting a driving corridor to the road detection results in the BEV. We believe this to be important for a meaningful evaluation as pixel-level performance is of limited value for vehicle control. State-of-the-art road detection algorithms are used to demonstrate results using classical pixel-level metrics in perspective and BEV space as well as the novel behavior-based performance measure. All data and annotations are made publicly available on the KITTI online evaluation website in order to serve as a common benchmark for road terrain detection algorithms. Road detection from images is a key task in autonomous driving. The recent advent of deep learning (and in particular, CNN or convolutional neural networks) has greatly improved the performance of road detection algorithms. In this paper, we show how to fuse multiple different cues under the same convolutional network framework. Specifically, we adopt a pre-trained Resnet-lOl to extract feature maps from RGB images; we then connect it with three extra deconvolution layers. These deconvolution layers is trained conditioning on appropriate image cues, and in our case they are a height image (i.e. elevation map obtained by e.g. Lidar scanner), image gradient, and position map. We also design two skip layers to speed up the convergence. Experiments on KITTI benchmark show competitive performance of our new networks.