Continuous and parallel LiDAR point-cloud clustering

Paper in proceeding, 2018

In distributed digitalized environments in the context of the Internet of Things, we often need to do an analysis of big data originating at high rate-sensors at the edge of the infrastructure. A characteristic example is the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, that allows sensing surrounding objects with fine-grained resolution in large areas. Their data (known as point clouds), generated continuously at very high rates, through appropriate analysis can provide information to support automated functionality in distributed cyber-physical? systems; clustering of point clouds is a key problem to extract this type of information. Methods for solving the problem in a continuous fashion can facilitate improved processing in fog architectures, through enabling low-latency, efficient continuous and streaming processing of data close to the sources; moreover, parallelism is a key requirement to exploit a variety of computing architectures in this context. We proposeLisco, a single-pass continuous Euclidean-distance-based clustering of LiDAR point clouds, that maximizes the granularity of the data processing pipeline and thus shows the potential for data-and pipeline-parallelism. We further present its parallel version, P-Lisco, that is architecture-independent and exploits the parallelism revealed byLisco'salgorithmic approach. Besides their algorithmic analysis, we provide a thorough experimental evaluation on architectures representative of high-end servers and of resource-constrained embedded devices and highlight the multiplicative improvements and scalability benefits of the proposed algorithms compared to the baseline, using both real-world datasets as well as synthetic ones to fully explore a wide spectrum of stress-levels for the algorithms.