Citation

Kim N, An J. Sensors (Basel) 2023; 24(1).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s24010079

PMID

38202941

PMCID

PMC10781397

Abstract

In this study, we propose a knowledge distillation (KD) method for segmenting off-road environment range images. Unlike urban environments, off-road terrains are irregular and pose a higher risk to hardware. Therefore, off-road self-driving systems are required to be computationally efficient. We used LiDAR point cloud range images to address this challenge. The three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data, which are rich in detail, require substantial computational resources. To mitigate this problem, we employ a projection method to convert the image into a two-dimensional (2D) image format using depth information. Our soft label-based knowledge distillation (SLKD) effectively transfers knowledge from a large teacher network to a lightweight student network. We evaluated SLKD using the RELLIS-3D off-road environment dataset, measuring the performance with respect to the mean intersection of union (mIoU) and GPU floating point operations per second (GFLOPS). The experimental results demonstrate that SLKD achieves a favorable trade-off between mIoU and GFLOPS when comparing teacher and student networks. This approach shows promise for enabling efficient off-road autonomous systems with reduced computational costs.

Language: en

Keywords

knowledge distillation; LiDAR point cloud; off-road; point cloud projection; range image; self-driving