Enhanced ground segmentation method for Lidar point clouds in human-centric autonomous robot systems

Ground segmentation is an important step for any autonomous and remote-controlled systems. After separating ground and nonground parts, many works such as object tracking and 3D reconstruction can be performed. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for segmenting the ground data of point clouds acquired from multi-channel Lidar sensors. The goal of this study is to completely separate ground points and nonground points in real time. The proposed method segments ground data efficiently and accurately in various environments such as flat terrain, undulating/rugged terrain, and mountainous terrain. First, the point cloud in each obtained frame is divided into small groups. We then focus on the vertical and horizontal directions separately, before processing both directions concurrently. Experiments were conducted, and the results showed the effectiveness of the proposed ground segment method. For flat and sloping terrains, the accuracy is over than 90%. Besides, the quality of the proposed method is also over than 80% for bumpy terrains. On the other hand, the speed is 145 frames per second. Therefore, in both simple and complex terrains, we gained good results and real-time performance.