Robust ground plane detection from 3D point clouds

Ground provides useful and basic information such as traversal regions and location of 3D objects. The given point cloud may contain a point not only from ground, but also from other objects such as walls and people. Those points from other objects can disturb to find and identify a ground plane. In this paper, we propose robust and fast ground plane detection with an asymmetric kernel and RANSAC. We derive a probabilistic model of a 3D point based on an observation that a point from other objects is always above the ground. The asymmetric kernel is its approximation for fast computation, which is incorporated with RANSAC as a score function. We demonstrate effectiveness of our proposed method as quantitative experiments with our on-road 3D LiDAR dataset. The experimental result presents that our method was sufficiently accurate with slightly more computation. Finally, we also show our ground detection´s application to augmented perception and visualization for drivers and remote operators.