See the Unseen: Grid-Wise Drivable Area Detection Dataset and Network Using LiDAR

Drivable Area (DA) detection is crucial for autonomous driving. Camera-based methods rely heavily on illumination conditions and often fail to capture accurate 3D information, while LiDAR-based methods offer accurate 3D data and are less susceptible to illumination conditions. However, existing LiDAR-based methods focus on point-wise detection, so are prone to occlusion and limited by point cloud sparsity, which leads to decreased performance in motion planning and localization. We propose Argoverse-grid, a grid-wise DA detection dataset derived from Argoverse 1, comprising over 20K frames with fine-grained BEV DA labels across various scenarios. We also introduce Grid-DATrNet, a first grid-wise DA detection model utilizing global attention through transformers. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of Grid-DATrNet over various methods, including both LiDAR and camera-based approaches, in detecting grid-wise DA on the proposed Argoverse-grid dataset. Grid-DATrNet achieves state-of-the-art results with an accuracy of 93.28% and an F1-score of 0.8328. We show that Grid-DATrNet can detect grids even in occluded and unmeasured areas by leveraging contextual and semantic information through global attention, unlike CNN-based DA detection methods. The preprocessing code for Argoverse-grid, experiment code, Grid-DATrNet implementation, and result visualization code are available at AVE Laboratory official git hub.