Drivable Road Detection with 3D Point Clouds Based on the MRF for Intelligent Vehicle

In this paper, a reliable road/obstacle detection with 3D point cloud for intelligent vehicle on a variety of challenging environments (undulated road and/or uphill/ downhill) is handled. For robust detection of road we propose the followings: 1) correction of 3D point cloud distorted by the motion of vehicle (high speed and heading up and down) incorporating vehicle posture information; 2) guideline for the best selection of the proper features such as gradient value, height average of neighboring node; 3) transformation of the road detection problem into a classification problem of different features; and 4) inference algorithm based on MRF with the loopy belief propagation for the area that the LIDAR does not cover. In experiments, we use a publicly available dataset as well as numerous scans acquired by the HDL-64E sensor mounted on experimental vehicle in inner city traffic scenes. The results show that the proposed method is more robust and reliable than the conventional approach based on the height value on the variety of challenging environment.