3D lidar point-cloud projection operator and transfer machine learning for effective road surface features detection and segmentation

Abstract

The classification and extraction of road markings and lanes are of critical importance to infrastructure assessment, planning and road safety. We present a pipeline for the accurate segmentation and extraction of rural road surface objects in 3D lidar point-cloud, as well as a method to extract geometric parameters belonging to tar seal. To decrease the computational resources needed, the point-clouds were aggregated into a 2D image space before being transformed using affine transformations. The Mask R-CNN algorithm is then applied to the transformed image space to localize, segment and classify the road objects. The segmentation results for road surfaces and markings can then be used for geometric parameter estimation such as road widths estimation, while the segmentation results show that the efficacy of the existing Mask R-CNN to segment needle-type objects is improved by our proposed transformations.