A Ground Segmentation Method Based on Point Cloud Map for Unstructured Roads

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel ground segmentation method for unstructured roads using point cloud maps, achieving high accuracy and real-time performance, especially suited for complex environments like open-pit mines.

Contribution

The proposed method uniquely combines region of interest extraction, point cloud registration, and background subtraction based on Gaussian models for improved segmentation.

Findings

Ground segmentation accuracy reaches 99.95%.

Real-time processing at 26ms per frame.

Outperforms Patchwork++ with 7.43% higher accuracy.

Abstract

Ground segmentation, as the basic task of unmanned intelligent perception, provides an important support for the target detection task. Unstructured road scenes represented by open-pit mines have irregular boundary lines and uneven road surfaces, which lead to segmentation errors in current ground segmentation methods. To solve this problem, a ground segmentation method based on point cloud map is proposed, which involves three parts: region of interest extraction, point cloud registration and background subtraction. Firstly, establishing boundary semantic associations to obtain regions of interest in unstructured roads. Secondly, establishing the location association between point cloud map and the real-time point cloud of region of interest by semantics information. Thirdly, establishing a background model based on Gaussian distribution according to location association, and segments the ground in real-time point cloud by the background substraction method. Experimental results show that the correct segmentation rate of ground points is 99.95%, and the running time is 26ms. Compared with state of the art ground segmentation algorithm Patchwork++, the average accuracy of ground point segmentation is increased by 7.43%, and the running time is increased by 17ms. Furthermore, the proposed method is practically applied to unstructured road scenarios represented by open pit mines.