Online Learning For Human Classification In 3D LiDAR

2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)September 24–28, 2017, Vancouver, BC, CanadaOnline Learning for Human Classification in 3D LiDAR-based TrackingZhi Yan, Tom Duckett, Nicola Bellotto{zyan, tduckett, nbellotto}@lincoln.ac.ukLincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Lincoln, UKhttp://lcas.lincoln.ac.ukAbstract— Human detection and tracking are essential aspects to be considered in service robotics, as the robot often shares its workspace and interacts closely with humans.This paper presents an online learning framework for humanclassification in 3D LiDAR scans, taking advantage of robustmulti-target tracking to avoid the need for data annotation bya human expert. The system learns iteratively by retraininga classifier online with the samples collected by the robotover time. A novel aspect of our approach is that errors intraining data can be corrected using the information providedby the 3D LiDAR-based tracking. In order to do this, anefficient 3D cluster detector of potential human targets hasbeen implemented. We evaluate the framework using a new3D LiDAR dataset of people moving in a large indoor publicspace, which is made available to the research community. Theexperiments analyse the real-time performance of the clusterdetector and show that our online learned human classifiermatches and in some cases outperforms its offline version.Fig. 1. A screenshot of the 3D LiDAR-based tracking system in action withan online learned human classifier. The detected people are enclosed in greenbounding boxes. The colored lines are the people trajectories generated bythe tracker.I. INTRODUCTIONclassifier for human detection, which usually requires a largenumber of manually-annotated training data. Unfortunately,labelling this data is tedious work that is prone to humanerror. Such an approach is also infeasible when dealing withvery complex real-world scenarios and when the same systemneeds to be (re-)trained for different environments.In this paper, we develop an online learning frameworkto classify humans from 3D LiDAR detections, taking advantage of and extending our previously developed multitarget tracking system1 [10] to work with 3D LiDAR scans.We rely on the judgement of a false-positive and a falsenegative estimator, similarly to the Positive and Negative“experts” proposed in previous tracking-learning-detectiontechniques [11], but in this case to train online a classifierthat only looks for humans among the detections (i.e. theclassification performance does not influence the tracking).The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, wepresent a computationally efficient clustering algorithm for3D LiDAR scans suitable for real-time model-free detectionand tracking. Then, we propose a framework for onlinelearning of a human classifier, which estimates the classifier’serrors and updates it to continually improve its performance.Finally, we provide a large dataset2 of partially-labeled 3DLiDAR point clouds to be used by the research communityfor training and comparison of human classifiers. This datasetcaptures new research challenges for indoor service robotsIn service robotics, detecting and tracking moving objectsis key to implementing useful and safe robot behaviors.Identifying which of the detected objects are humans isparticularly important for domestic and public environments.Typically the robot is required to collect environmental dataof the surrounding area using its on-board sensors, analysingwhere humans are and where they are going to. Humansshould be detected and tracked accurately and as early aspossible in order to have enough time to react accordingly.Unfortunately many service robots trade accuracy and robustness of the tracking with the actual coverage area ofthe detection (i.e. maximum range and field of view of thesensors), which is often limited to a few meters and smallangular intervals.3D LiDAR sensors have recently been applied to manyapplications in robotics and autonomous vehicles, eitheralone [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] or in combinationwith other sensors [8], [9], including human tracking. Animportant specification of this type of sensor is the ability toprovide long-range and wide-angle laser scans. In addition,3D LiDARs are usually very accurate and not affectedby lighting conditions. However, humans are difficult toidentify in 3D LiDAR scans because there are no lowlevel features such as texture and colour, and because of thelack of details when the person is far away from the robot.Detecting features in 3D scans can also be computationallyvery expensive, as the covered area grows with the rangeof the sensor, as does the number of human candidates.Moreover, previous methods mostly apply an offline learned978-1-5386-2682-5/17/ 31.00 2017 IEEE1 https://github.com/lcas/bayestracking2 ftware/l-cas-3d-point-cloud-people-dataset/864

including human groups, children, people with trolley, etc.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.Section II gives an overview of the related literature, in particular about 3D LiDAR-based human detection and tracking.Then, we introduce our framework in Section III and thelink between tracking and online learning. The former ispresented in Section IV, including a detailed descriptionof the 3D cluster detection. The actual online learning isexplained in Section V, which clarifies the role of the P-Nexperts in the classification improved by tracking. Section VIpresents the experimental setup and results, as well as ournew 3D LiDAR dataset. Finally, conclusions and futureresearch are discussed in Section VII.and assist human detection in the next LiDAR scan. Teichman et al. [5] presented a semi-supervised learning methodfor track classification. Their method requires a large setof labeled background objects (i.e. no pedestrians) to trainsclassifiers offline, which showed good performances for trackclassification but not for object recognition. Our solution,instead, simultaneously learns human and background, anditeratively corrects classification errors online.Besides datasets collected with RGB-D cameras [12], [13],[16], there are a few 3D LiDAR datasets available to thescientific community for outdoor scenarios [4], [6], [9], [17],but not with annotated data for human tracking in largeindoor environments, like the one presented here.Some authors proposed annotation-free methods. Deuge etal. [6] introduced an unsupervised feature learning approachfor outdoor object classification by projecting 3D LiDARscans into 2D depth images. Dewan et al. [18] proposeda model-free approach for detecting and tracking dynamicobjects, which relies only on motion cues. These methods,however, are either not very accurate or unsuitable for slowand static pedestrians.It is clear that there remains a large gap between the stateof the art and what would be required for an annotationfree, high-reliability human classification implementationthat works with 3D LiDAR scans. Our work helps toclose this gap by demonstrating that human classificationperformance can be improved by combining tracking andonline learning with a mobile robot in highly dynamicenvironments.II. RELATED WORKHuman detection and tracking have been widely studied inrecent years. Many popular approaches are based on RGB-Dcameras [12], [13], although these have limited range andfield of view. 3D LiDARs can be an alternative, but one of themain challenges working with these sensors is the difficultyof recognizing humans using only the relatively low information they provide. A possible approach to detect humansis by clustering point clouds in depth images or 3D laserscans. For example, Rusu [14] presented a straightforwardbut computationally expensive method based on Euclideandistance. Bogoslavskyi and Stachniss [15] proposed a fasterapproach, although the computational efficiency limits theclustering precision. In our method, instead, both runtimeand precision are opportunely balanced.A very common approach is to use an offline trained classifier for human detection. For example, Navarro-Serment etal. [1], introduced seven features for human classification andtrained an SVM classifier based on these features. Kidonoet al. [3] proposed two additional features considering the3D human shape and the clothing material (i.e. using thereflected laser beam intensities), showing significant classification improvements. Li et al. [7] implemented insteada resampling algorithm in order to improve the qualityof the geometric features proposed by the former authors.Spinello et al. [4] combined a top-down classifier based onvolumetric features and a bottom-up detector, to reduce falsepositives for distant persons tracked in 3D LiDAR scans.Wang and Posner [8] applied a sliding window approachto 3D point data for object detection, including humans.They divided the space enclosed by a 3D bounding boxinto sparse feature grids, then trained a linear SVM classifierbased on six features related to the occupancy of the cells,the distribution of points within them, and the reflectance ofthese points. The problem with offline methods, though, isthat the classifier needs to be manually retrained every timefor new environments.The above solutions rely on pre-trained classifiers to detecthumans from the most recent LiDAR scan. Only a few methods have been proposed that use tracking to boost humandetection. Shackleton et al. [2], for example, employed anExtended Kalman Filter to estimate the position of a targetIII. GENERAL FRAMEWORKOur learning framework is based on four main components: a 3D LiDAR point cluster detector, a multi-targettracker, a human classifier and a sample generator (seeFig. 2). At each iteration, a 3D LiDAR scan (i.e. 3D pointcloud) is first segmented into clusters. The position andvelocity of these clusters are estimated in real-time by amulti-target tracking system, which outputs the trajectoriesof all the clusters. At the same time, a classifier identifiesthe type of cluster, i.e. human or non-human. At first, theclassifier has to be initialised by supervised training withlabeled clusters of human subjects. The initial training set canbe very small though (e.g. one sample), as more samples willbe incrementally added and used for retraining the classifierin future iterations.The classifier can make two types of errors: false positiveand false negative. Based on the estimation of the error typeby two independent “experts”, i.e. a positive P-expert anda negative one N-expert, which cross-check the output ofthe classifier with that of the tracker, the sample generatorproduces new training data for the next iteration. In particular, the P-expert converts false negatives into positivesamples, while the N-expert converts false positives intonegative samples. When there are enough new samples, theclassifier is re-trained. The process typically iterates untilconvergence (i.e. no more false positives and false negatives)or some other stopping criterion is reached.865