# Annotation-Free Curb Detection Leveraging Altitude Difference Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [SqueezeSeg: Convolutional Neural Nets with Recurrent CRF for Real-Time Road-Object Segmentation from 3D LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07368/) (2017)
- [ZegCLIP: Towards Adapting CLIP for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03588/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Sparse-to-Dense: Self-supervised Depth Completion from LiDAR and Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00275/) (2018)
- [Point-to-Voxel Knowledge Distillation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02099/) (2022)
- [Cylinder3D: An Effective 3D Framework for Driving-scene LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01550/) (2020)
- [MobileOne: An Improved One millisecond Mobile Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04040/) (2022)
- [ClipSAM: CLIP and SAM Collaboration for Zero-Shot Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12665/) (2024)
- [Progressive LiDAR Adaptation for Road Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01206/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Segmentation using RGB-D Data for Robotic Wheelchairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05950/) (2020)
- [WS-3D-Lane: Weakly Supervised 3D Lane Detection With 2D Lane Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11523/) (2022)
- [CurbNet: Curb Detection Framework Based on LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16794/) (2024)
- [LaneCorrect: Self-supervised Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14671/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LiteViLNet: Lightweight Vision-LiDAR Fusion Network for Efficient Road Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21007/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Road curbs are considered as one of the crucial and ubiquitous traffic features, which are essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Current methods for detecting curbs primarily rely on camera imagery or LiDAR point clouds. Image-based methods are vulnerable to fluctuations in lighting conditions and exhibit poor robustness, while methods based on point clouds circumvent the issues associated with lighting variations. However, it is the typical case that significant processing delays are encountered due to the voluminous amount of 3D points contained in each frame of the point cloud data. Furthermore, the inherently unstructured characteristics of point clouds poses challenges for integrating the latest deep learning advancements into point cloud data applications. To address these issues, this work proposes an annotation-free curb detection method leveraging Altitude Difference Image (ADI), which effectively mitigates the aforementioned challenges. Given that methods based on deep learning generally demand extensive, manually annotated datasets, which are both expensive and labor-intensive to create, we present an Automatic Curb Annotator (ACA) module. This module utilizes a deterministic curb detection algorithm to automatically generate a vast quantity of training data. Consequently, it facilitates the training of the curb detection model without necessitating any manual annotation of data. Finally, by incorporating a post-processing module, we manage to achieve state-of-the-art results on the KITTI 3D curb dataset with considerably reduced processing delays compared to existing methods, which underscores the effectiveness of our approach in curb detection tasks.