TOMD: A Trail-based Off-road Multimodal Dataset for Traversable Pathway Segmentation under Challenging Illumination Conditions
This addresses a gap in autonomous navigation for critical applications like search and rescue, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multimodal fusion methods.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting traversable pathways in narrow, trail-like off-road environments for autonomous robots by introducing the TOMD dataset and a dynamic multiscale data fusion model, showing its effectiveness in segmentation under varying illumination conditions.
Detecting traversable pathways in unstructured outdoor environments remains a significant challenge for autonomous robots, especially in critical applications such as wide-area search and rescue, as well as incident management scenarios like forest fires. Existing datasets and models primarily target urban settings or wide, vehicle-traversable off-road tracks, leaving a substantial gap in addressing the complexity of narrow, trail-like off-road scenarios. To address this, we introduce the Trail-based Off-road Multimodal Dataset (TOMD), a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for such environments. TOMD features high-fidelity multimodal sensor data -- including 128-channel LiDAR, stereo imagery, GNSS, IMU, and illumination measurements -- collected through repeated traversals under diverse conditions. We also propose a dynamic multiscale data fusion model for accurate traversable pathway prediction. The study analyzes the performance of early, cross, and mixed fusion strategies under varying illumination levels. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the relevance of illumination in segmentation performance. We publicly release TOMD at https://github.com/yyyxs1125/TMOD to support future research in trail-based off-road navigation.