CNN-based human detection using a 3D LiDAR onboard a UAV

© 2020 IEEE. This paper addresses the problem of detecting humans in a point cloud taken with a 3D-LiDAR onboard a UAV. The potential use cases of this technology are numerous, examples include security and surveillance, disaster relief and search and rescue operations. In this paper, a CNN-based approach is proposed which is able to analyse point clouds returned by a 3D LiDAR sensor in such a way that it can detect humans. The algorithm described here consists of 3 main components: data pre-processing, post-processing, and human classification. In this paper objects were assigned to one of two classes: human and non-human. The classification was performed by projecting the 3D point cloud onto a series of 2D planes using occupancy grid mapping. This creates a set of silhouettes of the object corresponding to the top, front and side views. Classification is achieved by supervised CNNs using single-view and multi-view (3 channels) images patches.