Estimating ground and other planes from a single tilted laser range finder for on-road driving

We present a method for extracting ground and other planes from a single non rotating laser mounted on a slow moving car used for on-road driving. A laser scan is decomposed into linear clusters. Corresponding clusters from subsequent scans are merged to form planes. The ground plane is identified based on the current vehicle height and the variance in height of the planes. Once these seed planes are identified future scan points either get associated with these planes or result in formation of new planes. Scan points that do not belong to any of the plane are left as such in the representation. Since the robustness of the method is contingent on how a single scan is decomposed into linear clusters, we compare the quality of the terrain representation due to three such clustering methods, one by iterative end point fit, other by adaptive breakpoint detection and thirdly the current method based on adaptive cosine similarity.