Real-Time LIDAR-Based Urban Road and Sidewalk Detection for Autonomous Vehicles

Road and sidewalk detection in urban scenarios is a challenging task because of the road imperfections and high sensor data bandwidth. Traditional free space and ground filter algorithms are not sensitive enough for small height differences. Camera-based or sensor-fusion solutions are widely used to classify drivable road from sidewalk or pavement. A LIDAR sensor contains all the necessary information from which the feature extraction can be done. Therefore, this paper focuses on LIDAR-based feature extraction. For road and sidewalk detection, the current paper presents a real-time (20 Hz+) solution. This solution can also be used for local path planning. Sidewalk edge detection is the combination of three algorithms working parallelly. To validate the result, the de facto standard benchmark dataset, KITTI, was used alongside our measurements. The data and the source code to reproduce the results are shared publicly on our GitHub repository.