Path Segmentation from Point Cloud Data for Autonomous Navigation

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles require in-depth knowledge of their surroundings, making path segmentation and object detection crucial for determining the feasible region for path planning. Uniform characteristics of a road portion can be denoted by segmentations. Currently, road segmentation techniques mostly depend on the quality of camera images under different lighting conditions. However, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors can provide extremely precise 3D geometry information about the surroundings, leading to increased accuracy with increased memory consumption and computational overhead. This paper introduces a novel methodology which combines LiDAR and camera data for road detection, bridging the gap between 3D LiDAR Point Clouds (PCs). The assignment of semantic labels to 3D points is essential in various fields, including remote sensing, autonomous vehicles, and computer vision. This research discusses how to select the most relevant geometric features for path planning and improve autonomous navigation. An automatic framework for Semantic Segmentation (SS) is introduced, consisting of four processes: selecting neighborhoods, extracting classification features, and selecting features. The aim is to make the various components usable for end users without specialized knowledge by considering simplicity, effectiveness, and reproducibility. Through an extensive evaluation of different neighborhoods, geometric features, feature selection methods, classifiers, and benchmark datasets, the outcomes show that selecting the appropriate neighborhoods significantly develops 3D path segmentation. Additionally, selecting the right feature subsets can reduce computation time, memory usage, and enhance the quality of the results.