Plane extraction is regarded as a necessary function that supports judgment basis in many applications, including semantic digital map reconstruction and path planning for unmanned ground vehicles. Owing to the heterogeneous density and unstructured spatial distribution of three-dimensional (3D) point clouds collected by light detection and ranging (LiDAR), plane extraction from it is recently a significant challenge. This paper proposed a parallel 3D Hough transform algorithm to realize rapid and precise plane detection from 3D LiDAR point clouds. After transforming all the 3D points from a Cartesian coordinate system to a pre-defined 3D Hough space, the generated Hough space is rasterised into a series of arranged cells to store the resided point counts into individual cells. A 3D connected component labeling algorithm is developed to cluster the cells with high values in Hough space into several clusters. The peaks from these clusters are extracted so that the targeting planar surfaces are obtained in polar coordinates. Because the laser beams emitted by LiDAR sensor holds several fixed angles, the collected 3D point clouds distribute as several horizontal and parallel circles in plane surfaces. This kind of horizontal and parallel circles mislead plane detecting results from horizontal wall surfaces to parallel planes. For detecting accurate plane parameters, this paper adopts a fraction-to-fraction method to gradually transform raw point clouds into a series of sub Hough space buffers. In our proposed planar detection algorithm, a graphic processing unit (GPU) programming technology is applied to speed up the calculation of 3D Hough space updating and peaks searching.

Three-dimensional virtual environments can be configured as test environments of autonomous things, and remote sensing by 3D point clouds collected by light detection and range (LiDAR) can be used to detect virtual human objects by segmenting collected 3D point clouds in a virtual environment. The use of a traditional encoder-decoder model, such as DeepLabV3, improves the quality of the low-density 3D point clouds of human objects, where the quality is determined by the measurement gap of the LiDAR lasers. However, whenever a human object with a surrounding environment in a 3D point cloud is used by the traditional encoder-decoder model, it is difficult to increase the density fitting of the human object. This paper proposes a DeepLabV3-Refiner model, which is a model that refines the fit of human objects using human objects whose density has been increased through DeepLabV3. An RGB image that has a segmented human object is defined as a dense segmented image. DeepLabV3 is used to make predictions of dense segmented images and 3D point clouds for human objects in 3D point clouds. In the Refiner model, the results of DeepLabV3 are refined to fit human objects, and a dense segmented image fit to human objects is predicted. The dense 3D point cloud is calculated using the dense segmented image provided by the DeepLabV3-Refiner model. The 3D point clouds that were analyzed by the DeepLabV3-Refiner model had a 4-fold increase in density, which was verified experimentally. The proposed method had a 0.6% increase in density accuracy compared to that of DeepLabV3, and a 2.8-fold increase in the density corresponding to the human object. The proposed method was able to provide a 3D point cloud that increased the density to fit the human object. The proposed method can be used to provide an accurate 3D virtual environment by using the improved 3D point clouds.

Fast and accurate obstacle detection is essential for accurate perception of mobile vehicles’ environment. Because point clouds sensed by light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors are sparse and unstructured, traditional obstacle clustering on raw point clouds are inaccurate and time consuming. Thus, to achieve fast obstacle clustering in an unknown terrain, this paper proposes an elevation-reference connected component labeling (ER-CCL) algorithm using graphic processing unit (GPU) programing. LiDAR points are first projected onto a rasterized x–z plane so that sparse points are mapped into a series of regularly arranged small cells. Based on the height distribution of the LiDAR point, the ground cells are filtered out and a flag map is generated. Next, the ER-CCL algorithm is implemented on the label map generated from the flag map to mark individual clusters with unique labels. Finally, obstacle labeling results are inverse transformed from the x–z plane to 3D points to provide clustering results. For real-time 3D point cloud clustering, ER-CCL is accelerated by running it in parallel with the aid of GPU programming technology.

Environmental perception provides the necessary information for unmanned ground vehicles to recognize and interact with surrounding objects. Velodyne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is widely used for this purpose due to its significant advantages such as high precision and being uninfluenced by varying illuminations. However, the unstructured distribution of LiDAR point clouds always affects the performance of feature extraction and object recognition. Moreover, the numbers of parameters in most deep learning models of object recognition are very large and the training process costs lots of computation consumption. This paper proposes a broad learning system (BLS) variant with a unified space autoencoder (USAE) as a lightweight model to recognize 3D objects. When the proposed method was evaluated on the LiDAR point cloud dataset and ModelNet10 dataset, the experimental results indicated that the recognition accuracy of our USAE-BLS model was similar to that of state-of-the-art 3D object recognition models. Moreover, the USAE-BLS has a much smaller model size and shorter training time than that of the deep learning models.

Recent research on deep learning has been applied to a diversity of fields. In particular, numerous studies have been conducted on self-driving vehicles using end-to-end approaches based on images captured by a single camera. End-to-end controls learn the output vectors of output devices directly from the input vectors of available input devices. In other words, an end-to-end approach learns not by analyzing the meaning of input vectors, but by extracting optimal output vectors based on input vectors. Generally, when end-to-end control is applied to self-driving vehicles, the steering wheel and pedals are controlled autonomously by learning from the images captured by a camera. However, high-resolution images captured from a car cannot be directly used as inputs to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) owing to memory limitations; the image size needs to be efficiently reduced. Therefore, it is necessary to extract features from captured images automatically and to generate input images by merging the parts of the images that contain the extracted features. This paper proposes a learning method for end-to-end control that generates input images for CNNs by extracting road parts from input images, identifying the edges of the extracted road parts, and merging the parts of the images that contain the detected edges. In addition, a CNN model for end-to-end control is introduced. Experiments involving the Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS), a sustainable computing environment for cars, confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method for self-driving by comparing the accumulated difference in the angle of the steering wheel in the images generated by it with those of resized images containing the entire captured area and cropped images containing only a part of the captured area. The results showed that the proposed method reduced the accumulated difference by 0.839% and 0.850% compared to those yielded by the resized images and cropped images, respectively.