VolMap: A Real-time Model for Semantic Segmentation of a LiDAR surrounding view

This paper introduces VolMap, a real-time approach for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR surrounding view system in autonomous vehicles. We designed an optimized deep convolution neural network that can accurately segment the point cloud produced by a 360\degree{} LiDAR setup, where the input consists of a volumetric bird-eye view with LiDAR height layers used as input channels. We further investigated the usage of multi-LiDAR setup and its effect on the performance of the semantic segmentation task. Our evaluations are carried out on a large scale 3D object detection benchmark containing a LiDAR cocoon setup, along with KITTI dataset, where the per-point segmentation labels are derived from 3D bounding boxes. We show that VolMap achieved an excellent balance between high accuracy and real-time running on CPU.

YOLO3D: End-to-end real-time 3D Oriented Object Bounding Box Detection from LiDAR Point Cloud

Object detection and classification in 3D is a key task in Automated Driving (AD). LiDAR sensors are employed to provide the 3D point cloud reconstruction of the surrounding environment, while the task of 3D object bounding box detection in real time remains a strong algorithmic challenge. In this paper, we build on the success of the one-shot regression meta-architecture in the 2D perspective image space and extend it to generate oriented 3D object bounding boxes from LiDAR point cloud. Our main contribution is in extending the loss function of YOLO v2 to include the yaw angle, the 3D box center in Cartesian coordinates and the height of the box as a direct regression problem. This formulation enables real-time performance, which is essential for automated driving. Our results are showing promising figures on KITTI benchmark, achieving real-time performance (40 fps) on Titan X GPU.