3D-DEEP: 3-Dimensional Deep-learning based on elevation patterns for road scene interpretation

Road detection and segmentation is a crucial task in computer vision for safe autonomous driving. With this in mind a new net architecture (3D-DEEP) and its end-to-end training methodology for CNN-based semantic segmentation is described along this paper for. The method relies on disparity filtered and LiDAR projected images for three-dimensional information and image feature extraction through fully convolutional networks architectures. The developed models were trained and validated over Cityscapes dataset using just fine annotation examples with 19 different training classes, and over KITTI road dataset. 72.32% mean intersection over union (mIoU) has been obtained for the 19 Cityscapes training classes using the validation images. On the other hand, over KITTI dataset the model has achieved an F1 error value of 97.85% in validation and 96.02% using the test images.