Pedestrian Intensive Scanning for Active-scan LIDAR

In recent years, LIDAR is playing an important role as a sensor for understanding environments of a vehicle’s surroundings. Active-scan LIDAR is being actively developed as a LIDAR that can control the laser irradiation direction arbitrary and rapidly. In comparison with conventional uniform-scan LIDAR (e.g. Velodyne HDL-64e), Active-scan LIDAR enables us to densely scan even distant pedestrians. In addition, if appropriately controlled, this sensor has a potential to reduce unnecessary laser irradiations towards non-target objects. Although there are some preliminary studies on pedestrian scanning strategy for Active-scan LIDARs, in the best of our knowledge, an efficient method has not been realized yet. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel pedestrian scanning method based on orientation aware pedestrian likelihood estimation using the orientation-wise pedestrian’s shape models with local distribution of measured points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments by simulating Active-scan LIDAR using point-clouds from the KITTI dataset. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods.