3D LIDAR processing for vehicle safety and environment recognition

Automotive safety systems like ldquoadaptive cruise controlrdquo (ACC), ldquolane change assistrdquo and pre-crash systems are nowadays dealing with the detection of vehicles on the road. All major upper class vehicle manufacturers like Mercedes, BMW, Chrysler and Lexus as well as leading suppliers (Bosch, Continental, Delphi) are currently developing intelligent vehicle safety systems. For vehicle environment perception many different sensors are under investigation. Well known and cheap devices like grayscale cameras are already integrated in many cars today, e.g. for parking assist functions. To meet the requirements for extremely reliable and robust environment recognition additional sensors and multi sensor data fusion approaches have to be applied. New sensors like 3-dimensional measuring multilayer laser scanner systems will be introduced in the near future to deliver environment information for these systems. By fusing multiple sensors like laser and radar systems the reliability level of automotive safety applications will be improved significantly. The paper presents an approach for the processing of the data of a multilayer laser scanner (lidar) for the detection of vehicles in road environments. The lidar data is processed using a new 3-dimensional occupancy grid. An example is given for an automotive pre-crash safety application.