Recent developments in robotics and intelligent vehicle area, bring interests of people in an autonomous driving ability and advanced driving assistance system. Especially fully automatic parking ability is one of the key issues of intelligent vehicles, and accurate parked vehicles detection is essential for this issue. In previous researches, many types of sensors are used for detecting vehicles, 2D LiDAR is popular since it offers accurate range information without preprocessing. The L shape feature is most popular 2D feature for vehicle detection, however it has an ambiguity on different objects such as building, bushes and this occurs misdetection problem. Therefore we propose the accurate vehicle detection method by using a 3D complete vehicle model in 3D point clouds acquired from front inclined 2D LiDAR. The proposed method is decomposed into two steps: vehicle candidate extraction, vehicle detection. By combination of L shape feature and point clouds segmentation, we extract the objects which are highly related to vehicles and apply 3D model to detect vehicles accurately. The method guarantees high detection performance and gives plentiful information for autonomous parking. To evaluate the method, we use various parking situation in complex urban scene data. xperimental results shows the qualitative and quantitative performance efficiently.

In recent years, the research of 3D mapping technique in urban environments obtained by mobile robots equipped with multiple sensors for recognizing the robot’s surroundings is being studied actively. However, the map generated by simple integration of multiple sensors data only gives spatial information to robots. To get a semantic knowledge to help an autonomous mobile robot from the map, the robot has to convert low-level map representations to higher-level ones containing semantic knowledge of a scene. Given a 3D point cloud of an urban scene, this research proposes a method to recognize the objects effectively using 3D graph model for autonomous mobile robots. The proposed method is decomposed into three steps: sequential range data acquisition, normal vector estimation and incremental graph-based segmentation. This method guarantees the both real-time performance and accuracy of recognizing the objects in real urban environments. Also, it can provide plentiful data for classifying the objects. To evaluate a performance of proposed method, computation time and recognition rate of objects are analyzed. Experimental results show that the proposed method has efficiently in understanding the semantic knowledge of an urban environment.