2D vs. 3D LiDAR-based Person Detection on Mobile Robots

Understand

Person detection is a crucial task for mobile robots navigating in human-populated environments.

• LiDAR sensors are promising for this task, thanks to their accurate depth measurements and large field of view.
• Two types of LiDAR sensors exist: the 2D LiDAR sensors, which scan a single plane, and the 3D LiDAR sensors, which scan multiple planes, thus forming a volume.
• How do they compare for the task of person detection? To answer this, we conduct a series of experiments, using the public, large-scale JackRabbot dataset and the state-of-the-art 2D and 3D LiDAR-based person detectors (DR-SPAAM and CenterPoint respectively).