One-shot domain adaptive real-time 3D obstacle detection in farmland based on semantic-geometry-intensity fusion strategy

By introducing deep learning, LiDAR-based solutions have achieved impressive accuracy in 3D obstacle detection. However, gathering and labeling sufficient samples is the precondition for the effectiveness of existing solutions. This precondition is difficult to satisfy in actual farmland due to the scarcity of distinctive obstacle samples as well as the time-consuming and specialized labeling process. In practice, detection models trained on specific datasets may fail to generalize well to real farmland, as they lack adaptability to different categories and scenes. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel one-shot domain adaptive real-time 3D obstacle detection method based on semantic-geometry-intensity fusion strategy. By introducing the concept of one-shot domain adaptation, the proposed method enables fine-grained 3D obstacle detection with just one sample per category. Specifically, a semantic-geometry-intensity space generator is designed to bridge the category gap between training and test samples. The integration of semantic-geometry-intensity space-based classifier and centerpoint-based anchor-free locator is designed to keep a decent balance between accuracy and efficiency. The switching between object sample enhancer and fusion point cloud generator is designed to handle distribution differences of both points and categories. The obstacle detection system designed based on the proposed method has been tested in real farmland, achieving an overall F1 score of 89.54% and a Frame Rate of 21.32 Frames Per Second (FPS). These experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in performing obstacle detection.