Obstacle Detection Using a Facet-Based Representation from 3-D LiDAR Measurements

In this paper, we propose an obstacle detection approach that uses a facet-based obstacle representation. The approach has three main steps: ground point detection, clustering of obstacle points, and facet extraction. Measurements from a 64-layer LiDAR are used as input. First, ground points are detected and eliminated in order to select obstacle points and create object instances. To determine the objects, obstacle points are grouped using a channel-based clustering approach. For each object instance, its contour is extracted and, using an RANSAC-based approach, the obstacle facets are selected. For each processing stage, optimizations are proposed in order to obtain a better runtime. For the evaluation, we compare our proposed approach with an existing approach, using the KITTI benchmark dataset. The proposed approach has similar or better results for some obstacle categories but a lower computational complexity.