TRAVEL: Traversable Ground and Above-Ground Object Segmentation Using Graph Representation of 3D LiDAR Scans

Perception of traversable regions and objects of interest from a 3D point cloud is one of the critical tasks in autonomous navigation. A ground vehicle needs to look for traversable terrains that are explorable by wheels. Then, to make safe navigation decisions, the segmentation of objects positioned on those terrains has to be followed up. However, over-segmentation and under-segmentation can negatively influence such navigation decisions. To that end, we propose TRAVEL, which performs traversable ground detection and object clustering simultaneously using the graph representation of a 3D point cloud. To segment the traversable ground, a point cloud is encoded into a graph structure, tri-grid field, which treats each tri-grid as a node. Then, the traversable regions are searched and redefined by examining local convexity and concavity of edges that connect nodes. On the other hand, our above-ground object segmentation employs a graph structure by representing a group of horizontally neighboring 3D points in a spherical-projection space as a node and vertical/horizontal relationship between nodes as an edge. Fully leveraging the node-edge structure, the above-ground segmentation ensures real-time operation and mitigates over-segmentation. Through experiments using simulations, urban scenes, and our own datasets, we have demonstrated that our proposed traversable ground segmentation algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of the conventional metrics and that our newly proposed evaluation metrics are meaningful for assessing the above-ground segmentation. We will make the code and our own dataset available to public at https://github.com/url-kaist/TRAVEL.