Stereo and LIDAR Fusion based Detection of Humans and Other Obstacles in Farming Scenarios

Abstract

In this paper we propose a fusion method which uses the depth information acquired from a LIDAR sensor to guide a block matching stereo algorithm. The resulting fused point clouds are then used for obstacle detection, either by processing the raw data and clustering the protruding objects in the scene, or by applying a Convolutional Neural Network on the 3D points and labeling them into classes. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by carrying out a series of experiments on different data sets obtained from the SAFE robotic platform. The results show that the fusion algorithm significantly improves the F1 detection score of the trained networks.