Graph-based Segmentation for Scene Understanding of an Autonomous Vehicle in Urban Environments

In recent years, the research of 3D mapping technique in urban environments obtained by mobile robots equipped with multiple sensors for recognizing the robot`s surroundings is being studied actively. However, the map generated by simple integration of multiple sensors data only gives spatial information to robots. To get a semantic knowledge to help an autonomous mobile robot from the map, the robot has to convert low-level map representations to higher-level ones containing semantic knowledge of a scene. Given a 3D point cloud of an urban scene, this research proposes a method to recognize the objects effectively using 3D graph model for autonomous mobile robots. The proposed method is decomposed into three steps: sequential range data acquisition, normal vector estimation and incremental graph-based segmentation. This method guarantees the both real-time performance and accuracy of recognizing the objects in real urban environments. Also, it can provide plentiful data for classifying the objects. To evaluate a performance of proposed method, computation time and recognition rate of objects are analyzed. Experimental results show that the proposed method has efficiently in understanding the semantic knowledge of an urban environment.