A Multiple Llyods Approach for LiDAR Point Cloud Quantization and Communication

The development and usage of drones and LiDARs have become common in forestry, archaeology, surveillance, and intruders in recent years. Even though both domains reached a very mature state, the usage, integration of LiDAR scanning from drones, security, and low bandwidth constraints are still fantasy. This paper proposed to use LiDAR on a drone to scan the area, quantize the point cloud, and communicate it to the ground station through free space communication. The purpose of open space communication rather than cloud-based solutions is to avoid related security threats. In addition, this paper uses Lloyds-based quantization to achieve optimality in the quantization scheme. Before transmitting the point cloud, it is proposed to quantize it in parallel optimal quantizers. As a result of the proposed quantizer model, we calculated the RMSE, bandwidth, and choice of communication module for this particular scenario. The quantization loss is shown in terms of RMSE, bandwidth, and channel capacity requirements depicted with some bits. RMSE value obtained in this work for the Lloyds quantization method is 0.899. The LiDAR point cloud data is transmitted to ground station with data rate of 21Mbps utilizing free space optical communication.

I. Introduction

The radar and lidar sensors existed years back and have been applied to various fields like aviation, archaeology, surveillance, area mapping, etc. The lidar is an optical version of the radar, and both these sensors are specialized to provide various functionalities like environmental perception [1], tracking [2], classification [3], nano and micro object detection [4] and scene imaging [5]. Nowadays, these sensors are widely adapted for the automotive industry owing to their single-chip, low input power, and operating in a fog, snow, rain, and no-light conditions. After this on-road automotive mobility, the researchers are looking into on-air mobility, especially by installing radar/lidar onto an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) to perform various archaeological survey, surveillance, and area mapping applications. Combined with UAV technology and sensing technology, the on-air systems are rapidly prototyping and established as one of the emerging research areas.