UFO: Uncertainty-aware LiDAR-image Fusion for Off-road Semantic Terrain Map Estimation
This work addresses the challenge of reliable semantic understanding for autonomous vehicles in off-road settings, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating accurate semantic terrain maps for autonomous off-road navigation by proposing a learning-based LiDAR-image fusion method, which improves accuracy in off-road environments without needing precise 3D annotations.
Autonomous off-road navigation requires an accurate semantic understanding of the environment, often converted into a bird's-eye view (BEV) representation for various downstream tasks. While learning-based methods have shown success in generating local semantic terrain maps directly from sensor data, their efficacy in off-road environments is hindered by challenges in accurately representing uncertain terrain features. This paper presents a learning-based fusion method for generating dense terrain classification maps in BEV. By performing LiDAR-image fusion at multiple scales, our approach enhances the accuracy of semantic maps generated from an RGB image and a single-sweep LiDAR scan. Utilizing uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels further enhances the network's ability to learn reliably in off-road environments without requiring precise 3D annotations. By conducting thorough experiments using off-road driving datasets, we demonstrate that our method can improve accuracy in off-road terrains, validating its efficacy in facilitating reliable and safe autonomous navigation in challenging off-road settings.