LiDAR-Based Occupancy Grid Map Estimation Exploiting Spatial Sparsity

The problem of estimating occupancy grids to support automotive driving applications using LiDAR sensor point clouds is considered. We formulate the problem as a sparse binary occupancy value reconstruction problem. Our proposed occupancy grid estimation method is based on pattern-coupled sparse Bayesian learning and exploits the inherent sparsity and spatial occupancy dependencies in LiDAR sensor measurements. The proposed method demonstrates enhanced detection capabilities compared to commonly used benchmark methods, as observed through testing on scenes from the nuScenes dataset.