Off-Road Drivable Area Detection: A Learning-Based Approach Exploiting LiDAR Reflection Texture Information

The detection of drivable areas in off-road scenes is a challenging problem due to the presence of unstructured class boundaries, irregular features, and dust noise. Three-dimensional LiDAR data can effectively describe the terrain features, and a bird’s eye view (BEV) not only shows these features, but also retains the relative size of the environment compared to the forward viewing. In this paper, a method called LRTI, which is used for detecting drivable areas based on the texture information of LiDAR reflection data, is proposed. By using an instance segmentation network to learn the texture information, the drivable areas are obtained. Furthermore, a multi-frame fusion strategy is applied to improve the reliability of the output, and a shelter’s mask of a dynamic object is added to the neural network to reduce the perceptual delay caused by multi-frame fusion. Through TensorRT quantization, LRTI achieves real-time processing on the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The experiments on our dataset show the robustness and adaptability of LRTI to sand dust and occluded scenes.