Accuracy improvement of Pulsed LiDAR using an Adaptive Radius Outlier Removal Algorithm

Abstract

The pulsed time-of-flight LiDAR (light detection and ranging) has been used in various fields for accurate 2D and 3D distance measurement at outdoor applications such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. Pulsed LiDAR are very sensitive to environmental factors such as snow and rain, which causes severe measurement errors. There are conventional methods such as multi-echo algorithm and radius outlier removal method used to overcome the problems. However, they have some disadvantages of complicated processing and performance limitation. In this work, time and distance-adaptive radius outlier removal method is proposed to improve the measurement performance against the environmental factors. Experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed method using a Pulsed LiDAR developed in a Sensor and Actuator lab. in GIST.