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Automotive Engineering ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (10): 1872-1884.doi: 10.19562/j.chinasae.qcgc.2025.10.003

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Unpaved Road Unevenness Recognition and Driving Risk Model Construction Based on the Improved Pointnet++

Wenguang Wu1(),Songjiang Qiu1,Lin Hu1,Xiaoqiang Zhang2,Zenghua Qiu3,Jiakai Wang1   

  1. 1.College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering,Changsha University of Science and Technology,Changsha 410114
    2.Xiangtan Electric Manufacturing Group Heavy-Duty Equipment Co. ,Ltd. ,Xiangtan 411101
    3.Xiangtan Electric Manufacturing Group Co. ,Ltd. ,Xiangtan 411101
  • Received:2025-03-28 Revised:2025-05-05 Online:2025-10-25 Published:2025-10-20
  • Contact: Wenguang Wu E-mail:wwglq@csust.edu.cn

Abstract:

Potholes and bulges on unpaved road have a significant impact on vehicle driving safety. However, these uneven features cannot be simply regarded as obstacles or surface roughness, posing challenges for vehicle path planning and driving safety assessment in unpaved road environment. To address this, a LiDAR point cloud-based vehicle risk modeling method is proposed, considering the effect of surface unevenness, such as height/depth, area, and shape, on driving safety. Firstly, for the characteristics of pothole and bump features in unpaved road point cloud data, an improved PointNet++ model is proposed to enhance semantic segmentation performance and accurately identify uneven structures. Then, based on the semantic segmentation results and the defined categories of interest, three clustering algorithms are compared, and DBSCAN is identified as the most efficient method for clustering uneven features in unpaved road. Finally, to reflect the impact of various potholes and bumps on vehicle safety, terrain category coefficients and terrain density risks are introduced. A two-dimensional Gaussian function is used to construct a risk model for uneven terrain, enabling parametric representation of driving risks in unpaved road scenarios. The experimental and simulation results show that the improved PointNet++ model increases mIoU by 5.7%, and improves accuracy and recall by 5.3% and 6.4%, respectively. The proposed method achieves high-precision recognition of unpaved road unevenness and driving risk modeling, exhibiting strong robustness across different point cloud densities, road coverage, and road scenarios.

Key words: unpaved road, unevenness, risk model, environmental perception