FedRME: Federated Road Markings Extraction from Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds

Abstract

Road markings extraction (RME) from 3D point clouds acquired by mobile LiDAR systems has been widely used for road safety and autonomous driving. However, due to the increasing awareness of personal data protection and national information security regulations, most autonomous driving companies are not willing to share their private point clouds data with the community. Therefore, such restriction of centralized training might inevitably inhibit the effectiveness of RME procedure. Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning architecture that could address the aforementioned privacy-accuracy dilemma to collaboratively learn a global RME model from multiple clients without sharing raw data. In this paper, we propose a novel FedRME, a federated road markings extraction system to collaboratively learn a global RME model with multiple privacy-preserved local models from 3D mobile LiDAR point clouds. FedRME adopt the classical FedAvg model to construct a generalizable global feature embedding model without accessing local data. Moreover, to tackle data heterogeneity problem that local models vary in point clouds volumes and categories, we design a dynamic weighting mechanism to optimize the cooperative training effectiveness before server aggregation. Experimental results on three real-world mobile LiDAR point clouds datasets with federated learning settings demonstrate that FedRME not only achieves superior performance but also reduces computation by up to 25%. The source code is available at https://github.com/WwZzz/easyFL#FedRME

Publication
IEEE International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design