Classification of Objects using CNN-Based Vision and Lidar Fusion in Autonomous Vehicle Environment

In the past decade, Autonomous Vehicle Systems (AVS) have advanced at an exponential rate, particularly due to improvements in artificial intelligence, which have had a significant impact on social as well as road safety and the future of transportation systems. The fusion of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and camera data in real-time is known to be a crucial process in many applications, such as in autonomous driving, industrial automation and robotics. Especially in the case of autonomous vehicles, the efficient fusion of data from these two types of sensors is important to enabling the depth of objects as well as the classification of objects at short and long distances. This paper presents classification of objects using CNN based vision and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) fusion in autonomous vehicles in the environment. This method is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and image up sampling theory. By creating a point cloud of LIDAR data up sampling and converting into pixel-level depth information, depth information is connected with Red Green Blue data and fed into a deep CNN. The proposed method can obtain informative feature representation for object classification in autonomous vehicle environment using the integrated vision and LIDAR data. This method is adopted to guarantee both object classification accuracy and minimal loss. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of presented approach for objects classification.