Sensor Data Fusion in Top-View Grid Maps using Evidential Reasoning with Advanced Conflict Resolution

Abstract: We present a new method to combine evidential top-view grid maps estimated based on heterogeneous sensor sources. Dempster's combination rule that is usually applied in this context provides undesired results with highly conflicting inputs. Therefore, we use more advanced evidential reasoning techniques and improve the conflict resolution by modeling the reliability of the evidence sources. We propose a data-driven reliability estimation to optimize the fusion quality using the Kitti-360 dataset. We apply the proposed method to the fusion of LiDAR and stereo camera data and evaluate the results qualitatively and quantitatively. The results demonstrate that our proposed method robustly combines measurements from heterogeneous sensors and successfully resolves sensor conflicts.