Hardware-Assisted Range Image Generation for LiDAR Point Clouds

As the need for efficient 3D data processing increases, particularly in autonomous driving applications, fast and resource-efficient methods for structuring and representing LiDAR data, such as range images (RIs), have become crucial. This letter presents a hardware-accelerated algorithm for generating RIs from 3D LiDAR point clouds, tailored for embedded platforms featuring Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The proposed solution enables real-time point cloud processing, achieving up to a 605% performance improvement over the PCL desktop implementation, and up to 470% when deployed in FPGA, while maintaining minimal hardware resource utilization.