VI-eye: Semantic-based 3D point cloud registration for infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving

Infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving is an emerging paradigm that aims to make affordable autonomous vehicles a reality. A key technology for realizing this vision is real-time point cloud registration which allows a vehicle to fuse the 3D point clouds generated by its own LiDAR and those on roadside infrastructures such as smart lampposts, which can deliver increased sensing range, more robust object detection, and centimeter-level navigation. Unfortunately, the existing methods for point cloud registration assume two clouds to share a similar perspective and large overlap, which result in significant delay and inaccuracy in real-world infrastructure-assisted driving settings. This paper proposes VI-Eye - the first system that can align vehicle-infrastructure point clouds at centimeter accuracy in real-time. Our key idea is to exploit traffic domain knowledge by detecting a set of key semantic objects including road, lane lines, curbs, and traffic signs. Based on the inherent regular geometries of such semantic objects, VI-Eye extracts a small number of saliency points and leverage them to achieve real-time registration of two point clouds. By allowing vehicles and infrastructures to extract the semantic information in parallel, VI-Eye leads to a highly scalable architecture for infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving. To evaluate the performance of VI-Eye, we collect two new multiview LiDAR point cloud datasets on an indoor autonomous driving testbed and a campus smart lamppost testbed, respectively. They contain total 915 point cloud pairs and cover three roads of 1.12km. Experiment results show that VI-Eye achieves centimeter-level accuracy within around 0.2s, and delivers a 5X improvement in accuracy and 2X speedup over state-of-the-art baselines.