Welcome to Journal of Automotive Safety and Energy,

Journal of Automotive Safety and Energy ›› 2024, Vol. 15 ›› Issue (4): 591-601.DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8484.2024.04.016

• Intelligent Driving and Intelligent Transportation • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Semantic segmentation of real-time LiDAR point clouds based on multi-scale self-attention

ZHANG Chen1(), LIU Chang1, ZHAO Jin1, WANG Guangwei1,2,*(), XU Qing2   

  1. 1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
    2. School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
  • Received:2023-12-14 Revised:2024-03-18 Online:2024-08-31 Published:2024-09-05

Abstract:

A real-time point cloud semantic segmentation method was proposed for mobile robot platforms through digital experiments, to enhance segmentation accuracy within the constraints of in-vehicle computing resources. The approach used a projection-based LiDAR technique, projecting the 3-D point cloud onto a spherical image and applying 2-D convolution. The approach integrated the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism, adapting the Transformer, a software semantic segmentation, architecture into convolution operations to build a multi-scale self-attention (MSSA) framework. The results show that on the NVIDIA JETSON AGX Xavier computing platform, the proposed method achieves a high segmentation accuracy with the mean ratio of Intersection to Union (mIoU) being 63.9%, and a fast detection speed of 41 frame/s, compared to state-of-the-art methods like the CENet, the FIDNet, and the PolarNet, therefore, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mobile robot platforms.

Key words: mobile robot platforms, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), point cloud, multi-scale self-attention (MSSA), semantic segmentation TRANSFORMER, convolutional neural networks

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