Environment Perception Architecture using Images and 3D Data

This paper discusses the architecture of an environment perception system for autonomous vehicles. The modules of the system are described briefly and we focus on important changes in the architecture that enable: decoupling of data acquisition from data processing; synchronous data processing; parallel computation on GPU and multiple CPU cores; efficient data passing using pointers; adaptive architecture capable of working with different number of sensors. The experimental results compare execution times before and after the proposed optimizations. We achieve a 10 Hz frame rate for an object detection system working with 4 cameras and 4 LIDAR point clouds.