Advancing Point Cloud Perception: A Focus on People Detection

Point-cloud data have become pivotal for three-dimensional scene analysis, yet robust real-time detection of humans remains challenging due to data sparsity, irregular sampling, and occlusions. In this study, we present a feature-engineered pipeline that uses a Random Forest Classifier (RFC) for efficient people detection in high-resolution LiDAR point clouds. Our contributions include: (1) detailed parameterization of a ground-removal algorithm using region growing; a compact feature set of 15 geometric and intensity-based descriptors; (3) comprehensive evaluation metrics on two datasets; and (4) comparative analysis against MLP and PointNet baselines. Experiments demonstrate that our RFC achieves good results. These results validate the practical applicability of our approach for real-time, on-device human detection in point-cloud environments.