Low resolution lidar-based multi object tracking for driving applications

Abstract

Vehicle detection and tracking in real scenarios are key com- ponents to develop assisted and autonomous driving systems. Lidar sen- sors are specially suitable for this task, as they bring robustness to harsh weather conditions while providing accurate spatial information. How- ever, the resolution provided by point cloud data is very scarce in com- parison to camera images. In this work we explore the possibilities of Deep Learning (DL) methodologies applied to low resolution 3D lidar sensors such as the Velodyne VLP-16 (PUCK), in the context of vehicle detection and tracking. For this purpose we developed a lidar-based sys- tem that uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to perform point- wise vehicle detection using PUCK data, and Multi-Hypothesis Extended Kalman Filters (MH-EKF), to estimate the actual position and veloci- ties of the detected vehicles. Comparative studies between the proposed lower resolution (VLP-16) tracking system and a high-end system, using Velodyne HDL-64, were carried out on the Kitti Tracking Benchmark dataset. Moreover, to analyze the influence of the CNN-based vehicle detection approach, comparisons were also performed with respect to the geometric-only detector. The results demonstrate that the proposed low resolution Deep Learning architecture is able to successfully accom- plish the vehicle detection task, outperforming the geometric baseline approach. Moreover, it has been observed that our system achieves a similar tracking performance to the high-end HDL-64 sensor at close range. On the other hand, at long range, detection is limited to half the distance of the higher-end sensor.