  In this work, a deep learning approach has been developed to carry out road
detection using only LIDAR data. Starting from an unstructured point cloud,
top-view images encoding several basic statistics such as mean elevation and
density are generated. By considering a top-view representation, road detection
is reduced to a single-scale problem that can be addressed with a simple and
fast fully convolutional neural network (FCN). The FCN is specifically designed
for the task of pixel-wise semantic segmentation by combining a large receptive
field with high-resolution feature maps. The proposed system achieved excellent
performance and it is among the top-performing algorithms on the KITTI road
benchmark. Its fast inference makes it particularly suitable for real-time
applications.
