Ground and Non-Ground Separation Filter for UAV Lidar Point Cloud

This paper proposes a novel approach for separating ground plane and non-ground objects on Lidar 3D point cloud as a filter. It is specially designed for real-time applications on unmanned aerial vehicles and works on sparse Lidar point clouds without preliminary mapping. We use this filter as a crucial component of fast obstacle avoidance system for agriculture drone operating at low altitude. As the first step, a point cloud is transformed into a depth image and then places with high density nearest to the vehicle (local maxima) are identified. Then we merge original depth image with identified locations after maximizing intensities of pixels in which local maxima were found. Next step is to calculate range angle image which represents angles between two consecutive laser beams based on improved depth image. Once a range angle image is constructed, smoothing is applied to reduce the noise. Finally, we find out connected components in the improved depth image while incorporating smoothed range angle image. This allows separating the non-ground objects. The rest of the locations of depth image belong to the ground plane. The filter has been tested on a simulated environment as well as an actual drone and provides real-time performance. We make our source code and dataset available online\footnote[2]{Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GPrathap/hagen.git