Fast and Lite Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving Utilizing LiDAR Synthetic Training Data

In the autonomous car, perception with point cloud semantic segmentation helps obtain a wealth of information about the surrounding road environment. Despite the massive progress of recent researches, the existing machine learning networks are still insufficient for online applications of autonomous driving due to too subdivided classes, the lack of training data, and their heavy computing load. To solve these problems, we propose a fast and lite point cloud semantic segmentation network for autonomous driving, which utilizes LiDAR synthetic data to improve the performance by transfer learning. First, we modify the labeling classes and generate the LiDAR synthetic data-set for additional training to alleviate the lack of training data of the realistic data-set. Then, to lower the computing load, we adopt a projection-based method and apply a lightweight segmentation network to projected LiDAR images, which has drastically reduced computing. Finally, we verified and evaluated the proposed network in this paper through experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed network can perform the three-dimensional point cloud semantic segmentation in an online way, in which the inference speed overwhelms the existing algorithms.