Detection and tracking of unknown objects on the road based on sparse LiDAR data for heavy duty vehicles

Sammanfattning: Environment perception within autonomous driving aims to provide a comprehensive and accurate model of the surrounding environment based on information from sensors. For the model to be comprehensive it must provide the kinematic state of surrounding objects. The existing approaches of object detection and tracking (estimation of kinematic state) are developed for dense 3D LiDAR data from a sensor mounted on a car. However, it is a challenge to design a robust detection and tracking algorithm for sparse 3D LiDAR data. Therefore, in this thesis we propose a framework for detection and tracking of unknown objects using sparse VLP-16 LiDAR data which is mounted on a heavy duty vehicle. Experiments reveal that the proposed framework performs well detecting trucks, buses, cars, pedestrians and even smaller objects of a size bigger than 61x41x40 cm. The detection distance range depends on the size of an object such that large objects (trucks and buses) are detected within 25 m while cars and pedestrians within 18 m and 15 m correspondingly. The overall multiple objecttracking accuracy of the framework is 79%.