A temporal filter approach for detection and reconstruction of curbs and road surfaces based on Conditional Random Fields

A temporal filter approach for real-time detection and reconstruction of curbs and road surfaces from 3D point clouds is presented. Instead of local thresholding, as used in many other approaches, a 3D curb model is extracted from the point cloud. The 3D points are classified to different parts of the model (i.e. road and sidewalk) using a temporally integrated Conditional Random Field (CRF). The parameters of curb and road surface are then estimated from the respectively assigned points, providing a temporal connection via a Kalman filter.