Environment perception is an important task for intelligent vehicles applications. Typically, multiple sensors with different characteristics are employed to perceive the environment. To robustly perceive the environment, the information from the different sensors are often integrated or fused. In this article, we propose to perform the sensor fusion and registration of the LIDAR and stereo camera using the particle swarm optimization algorithm, without the aid of any external calibration objects. The proposed algorithm automatically calibrates the sensors and registers the LIDAR range image with the stereo depth image. The registered LIDAR range image functions as the disparity map for the stereo disparity estimation and results in an effective sensor fusion mechanism. Additionally, we perform the image denoising using the modified non-local means filter on the input image during the stereo disparity estimation to improve the robustness, especially at night time. To evaluate our proposed algorithm, the calibration and registration algorithm is compared with baseline algorithms on multiple datasets acquired with varying illuminations. Compared to the baseline algorithms, we show that our proposed algorithm demonstrates better accuracy. We also demonstrate that integrating the LIDAR range image within the stereo's disparity estimation results in an improved disparity map with significant reduction in the computational complexity.

In this paper, we propose a novel gait recognition framework - Spherical Space Model with Human Point Clouds (SSM-HPC) to recognize front view of human gait. A new gait representation - Marching in Place (MIP) gait is also introduced which preserves the spatiotemporal characteristics of individual gait manner. In comparison with the previous studies on gait recognition which usually use human silhouette images from image sequences, this research applies three dimensional (3D) point clouds data of human body obtained from stereo camera. The proposed framework exhibits gait recognition rates superior to those of other gait recognition methods.