Flood-fill-based object segmentation and tracking for intelligent vehicles

In this article, an application for object segmentation and tracking for intelligent vehicles is presented. The proposed object segmentation and tracking method is implemented by combining three stages in each frame. First, based on our previous research on a fast ground segmentation method, the present approach segments three-dimensional point clouds into ground and non-ground points. The ground segmentation is important for clustering each object in subsequent steps. From the non-ground parts, we continue to segment objects using a flood-fill algorithm in the second stage. Finally, object tracking is implemented to determine the same objects over time in the final stage. This stage is performed based on likelihood probability calculated using features of each object. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system shows effective, real-time performance.