GSECnet: Ground Segmentation of Point Clouds for Edge Computing

Ground segmentation of point clouds remains challenging because of the sparse and unordered data structure. This paper proposes the GSECnet - Ground Segmentation network for Edge Computing, an efficient ground segmentation framework of point clouds specifically designed to be deployable on a low-power edge computing unit. First, raw point clouds are converted into a discretization representation by pillarization. Afterward, features of points within pillars are fed into PointNet to get the corresponding pillars feature map. Then, a depthwise-separable U-Net with the attention module learns the classification from the pillars feature map with an enormously diminished model parameter size. Our proposed framework is evaluated on SemanticKITTI against both point-based and discretization-based state-of-the-art learning approaches, and achieves an excellent balance between high accuracy and low computing complexity. Remarkably, our framework achieves the inference runtime of 135.2 Hz on a desktop platform. Moreover, experiments verify that it is deployable on a low-power edge computing unit powered 10 watts only.