Dense Road Surface Grip Map Prediction from Multimodal Image Data

Jyri Maanpää, Julius Pesonen, Heikki Hyyti, Iaroslav Melekhov, Juho Kannala, Petri Manninen, Antero Kukko, Juha Hyyppä

Abstract: Slippery road weather conditions are prevalent in many regions and cause a regular risk for traffic. Still, there has been less research on how autonomous vehicles could detect slippery driving conditions on the road to drive safely. In this work, we propose a method to predict a dense grip map from the area in front of the car, based on postprocessed multimodal sensor data. We trained a convolutional neural network to predict pixelwise grip values from fused RGB camera, thermal camera, and LiDAR reflectance images, based on weakly supervised ground truth from an optical road weather sensor.