MVLidarNet: Real-Time Multi-Class Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving Using Multiple Views
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Autonomous driving requires the inference of actionable information such as detecting and classifying objects, and determining the drivable space. To this end, we present a two-stage deep neural network (MVLidarNet) for multi-class object detection and drivable segmentation using multiple views of a single LiDAR point cloud. The first stage processes the point cloud projected onto a perspective view in order to semantically segment the scene. The second stage then processes the point cloud (along with semantic labels from the first stage) projected onto a bird's eye view, to detect and classify objects. Both stages are simple encoder-decoders. We show that our multi-view, multi-stage, multi-class approach is able to detect and classify objects while simultaneously determining the drivable space using a single LiDAR scan as input, in challenging scenes with more than one hundred vehicles and pedestrians at a time. The system operates efficiently at 150 fps on an embedded GPU designed for a self-driving car, including a postprocessing step to maintain identities over time. We show results on both KITTI and a much larger internal dataset, thus demonstrating the method's ability to scale by an order of magnitude.
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