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Range Statistics and Suppressing Snowflakes Detects for Laser Range Finders in Snowfall

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Intelligent Systems: From Theory to Practice

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 299))

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Abstract

This paper presents statistics on registrations from laser range finders in snowfall. The sensors are standard laser range finders in robotics, the LMS200 and the URG-04LX. Three different working cases were identified for the pulsed laser range finder.

1) Normal operation with background objects present within the range of the sensor.

2) Close range objects where ranges to objects are shorter than the pulse length.

3) Free-space in the background.

The findings are summarized as:

  • Two laser range finders have been used, one that sends out a pulsed wide beam and one with a modulated narrow laser beam. The narrow beam laser has better penetration between the snowflakes.

  • Median filtering shows a substantial reduction in snowflake detects.

  • The gamma distribution describes fairly well the range distribution of detected snowflakes.

  • In an intense snowfall where about 24% of the ranges detected snowflakes.

  • A time-polar median filter showed good results in suppressing snowflakes in range data.

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References

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Rönnbäck, S., Wernersson, Å. (2010). Range Statistics and Suppressing Snowflakes Detects for Laser Range Finders in Snowfall. In: Sgurev, V., Hadjiski, M., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Intelligent Systems: From Theory to Practice. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 299. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13428-9_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13428-9_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13427-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13428-9

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