Depth Clustering

This is a fast and robust algorithm to segment point clouds taken with Velodyne sensor into objects. It works with all available Velodyne sensors, i.e. 16, 32 and 64 beam ones.

Check out a video that shows all objects which have a bounding box of less than 10 squared meters:

How to build?

Prerequisites

Catkin.
OpenCV: sudo apt-get install libopencv-dev
QGLViewer: sudo apt-get install libqglviewer-dev
Qt (4 or 5 depending on system):
- Ubuntu 14.04: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
- Ubuntu 16.04: sudo apt-get install libqt5-dev
(optional) PCL - needed for saving clouds to disk
(optional) ROS - needed for subscribing to topics

Build script

This is a catkin package. So we assume that the code is in a catkin workspace and CMake knows about the existence of Catkin. Then you can build it from the project folder:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
(optional) ctest -VV

It can also be built with catkin_tools if the code is inside catkin workspace:

catkin build depth_clustering

P.S. in case you don't use catkin build you should. Install it by sudo pip install catkin_tools.

How to run?

See examples. There are ROS nodes as well as standalone binaries. Examples include showing axis oriented bounding boxes around found objects (these start with show_objects_ prefix) as well as a node to save all segments to disk. The examples should be easy to tweak for your needs.

Run on real world data

Go to folder with binaries:

cd <path_to_project>/build/devel/lib/depth_clustering

Frank Moosmann's "Velodyne SLAM" Dataset

Get the data:

mkdir data/; wget http://www.mrt.kit.edu/z/publ/download/velodyneslam/data/scenario1.zip -O data/moosmann.zip; unzip data/moosmann.zip -d data/; rm data/moosmann.zip

Run a binary to show detected objects:

./show_objects_moosmann --path data/scenario1/

Other data

There are also examples on how to run the processing on KITTI data and on ROS input. Follow the --help output of each of the examples for more details.

Documentation

You should be able to get Doxygen documentation by running:

cd doc/
doxygen Doxyfile.conf

Related publications

Please cite related papers if you use this code:

@InProceedings{bogoslavskyi16iros,
title     = {Fast Range Image-Based Segmentation of Sparse 3D Laser Scans for Online Operation},
author    = {I. Bogoslavskyi and C. Stachniss},
booktitle = {Proc. of The International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
year      = {2016},
url       = {http://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de/pdfs/bogoslavskyi16iros.pdf}
}

@Article{bogoslavskyi17pfg,
title   = {Efficient Online Segmentation for Sparse 3D Laser Scans},
author  = {I. Bogoslavskyi and C. Stachniss},
journal = {PFG -- Journal of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science},
year    = {2017},
pages   = {1--12},
url     = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs41064-016-0003-y},
}

vtpp2014 / depth_clustering