Fast segmentation of 3D point clouds for ground vehicles

This paper describes a fast method for segmentation of large-size long-range 3D point clouds that especially lends itself for later classification of objects. Our approach is targeted at high-speed autonomous ground robot mobility, so real-time performance of the segmentation method plays a critical role. This is especially true as segmentation is considered only a necessary preliminary for the more important task of object classification that is itself computationally very demanding. Efficiency is achieved in our approach by splitting the segmentation problem into two simpler subproblems of lower complexity: local ground plane estimation followed by fast 2D connected components labeling. The method's performance is evaluated on real data acquired in different outdoor scenes, and the results are compared to those of existing methods. We show that our method requires less runtime while at the same time yielding segmentation results that are better suited for later classification of the identified objects.