3D object recognition method with multiple feature extraction from LiDAR point clouds

Yifei Tian, Wei Song, Su Sun, Simon Fong, Shuanghui Zou

Abstract: During autonomous driving, fast and accurate object recognition supports environment perception for local path planning of unmanned ground vehicles. Feature extraction and object recognition from large-scale 3D point clouds incur massive computational and time costs. To implement fast environment perception, this paper proposes a 3D recognition system with multiple feature extraction from light detection and ranging point clouds modified by parallel computing. Effective object feature extraction is a necessary step prior to executing an object recognition procedure. In the proposed system, multiple geometry features of a point cloud that resides in corresponding voxels are computed concurrently. In addition, a scale filter is employed to convert feature vectors from uncertain count voxels to a normalized object feature matrix, which is convenient for object-recognizing classifiers. After generating the object feature matrices of all voxels, an initialized multilayer neural network (NN) model is trained offline through a large number of iterations. Using the trained NN model, real-time object recognition is realized using parallel computing technology to accelerate computation.