Online urban object recognition in point clouds using consecutive point information for urban robotic missions

• The online processing is achieved in order to cope with streaming point cloud data.
• The classification results contain probabilistic outputs in terms of confidence levels.
• It is available to train the classifier with a few examples based on generative model.

Urban object recognition is the ability to categorize ambient objects into several classes and it plays an important role in various urban robotic missions, such as surveillance, rescue, and SLAM. However, there were several difficulties when previous studies on urban object recognition in point clouds were adopted for robotic missions: offline-batch processing, deterministic results in classification, and necessity of many training examples. The aim of this paper is to propose an urban object recognition algorithm for urban robotic missions with useful properties: online processing, classification results with probabilistic outputs, and training with a few examples based on a generative model. To achieve this, the proposed algorithm utilizes the consecutive point information (CPI) of a 2D LIDAR sensor. This additional information was useful for designing an online algorithm consisting of segmentation and classification. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm using CPI enhances the applicability of urban object recognition for various urban robotic missions.