Off-Road Environment Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Vehicles Based on Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Abstract

For autonomous vehicles driving in off-road environments, it is crucial to have a sensitive environmental perception ability. However, semantic segmentation in complex scenes remains a challenging task. Most current methods for off-road environments often have the problems of single scene and low accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a semantic segmentation network based on LiDAR called Multi-scale Augmentation Point-Cylinder Network (MAPC-Net). The network uses a multi-layer receptive field fusion module to extract features from objects of different scales in off-road environments. Gated feature fusion is used to fuse PointTensor and Cylinder for encoding and decoding. In addition, we use CARLA to build off-road environments for obtaining datasets, and employ linear interpolation to enhance the training data to solve the problem of sample imbalance. Finally, we design experiments to verify the excellent semantic segmentation ability of MAPC-Net in an off-road environment. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-layer receptive field fusion module and data augmentation.