How to Build a Curb Dataset with LiDAR Data for Autonomous Driving

Curbs are one of the essential elements of urban and highway traffic environments. Robust curb detection provides road structure information for motion planning in an autonomous driving system. Commonly, video cameras and 3D LiDARs are mounted on autonomous vehicles for curb detection. However, camera-based methods suffer from challenging illumination conditions. During the long period of time before wide application of Deep Neural Network (DNN) with point clouds, LiDAR-based curb detection methods are based on hand-crafted features, which suffer from poor detection in some complex scenes. Recently, DNN-based dynamic object detection using LiDAR data has become prevalent, while few works pay attention to curb detection with a DNN approach due to lack of labeled data. A dataset with curb annotations or an efficient curb labeling approach, hence, is of high demand. In this paper, we present how to build a curb dataset with LiDAR data for autonomous driving highly automatically. Firstly, a Semantic High Definition map (SHD map) in a global coordinate frame is generated by applying both SLAM and semantic segmentation on consecutive LiDAR frames. Next, a Road HD map (RHD map) is generated from the SHD map by removing its dynamic noise caused by road users e.g. cars. After that, a Curb Instance map (CI map) can be obtained from the filtered RHD map by a series of curb point extraction and growing. Finally, the CI map can be projected back to single frames for direct, highly automatic curb labeling. In order to validate our proposed labeling method, on top of an open public LiDAR semantic dataset SemanticKITTI [1], an additional curb dataset is built. We run both semantic segmentation and instance segmentation methods on this built dataset. Experimental results show that the curb annotations have good consistency and accuracy. We released this dataset and it is publicly available at https://download.mindspore.cn.