Multi-Modal Multi-Task (3MT) Road Segmentation

Multi-modal systems have the capacity of producing more reliable results than systems with a single modality in road detection due to perceiving different aspects of the scene. We focus on using raw sensor inputs instead of, as it is typically done in many SOTA works, leveraging architectures that require high pre-processing costs such as surface normals or dense depth predictions. By using raw sensor inputs, we aim to utilize a low-cost model that minimizes both the pre-processing and model computation costs. This study presents a cost-effective and highly accurate solution for road segmentation by integrating data from multiple sensors within a multi-task learning architecture. A fusion architecture is proposed in which RGB and LiDAR depth images constitute the inputs of the network. Another contribution of this study is to use IMU/GNSS (inertial measurement unit/global navigation satellite system) inertial navigation system whose data is collected synchronously and calibrated with a LiDAR-camera to compute aggregated dense LiDAR depth images. It has been demonstrated by experiments on the KITTI dataset that the proposed method offers fast and high-performance solutions. We have also shown the performance of our method on Cityscapes where raw LiDAR data is not available. The segmentation results obtained for both full and half resolution images are competitive with existing methods. Therefore, we conclude that our method is not dependent only on raw LiDAR data; rather, it can be used with different sensor modalities. The inference times obtained in all experiments are very promising for real-time experiments.

Automated summary

Multi-modal systems outperform single modality systems in road detection by perceiving different aspects of the scene. This study proposes a cost-effective and accurate solution for road segmentation by integrating data from multiple sensors within a multi-task learning architecture. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method offers fast and high-performance solutions on both KITTI and Cityscapes datasets, and can be used with different sensor modalities, not just raw LiDAR data.