pi-Lisco: parallel and incremental stream-based point-cloud clustering

Point-cloud clustering is a key task in applications like autonomous vehicles and digital twins, where rotating LiDAR sensors commonly generate point-cloud measurements in data streams. The state-of-the-art algorithms, Lisco and its parallel equivalent P-Lisco, define a single-pass distance-based clustering. However, while outperforming other batch-based techniques, they cannot incrementally cluster point-clouds from consecutive LiDAR rotations, as they cannot exploit result-similarity between rotations.

The simplicity of Lisco, along with the potential of improvements through utilization of computational overlaps, form the motivation of a more challenging objective studied here. We propose Parallel and Incremental Lisco (pi-Lisco), which, with a simple yet efficient approach, clusters LiDAR data in streaming sliding windows, reusing the results from overlapping portions of the data, thus, enabling single-window (i.e., in-place) processing. Moreover, pi-Lisco employs efficient work-sharing among threads, facilitated by the ScaleGate data structure, and embeds a customised version of the STINGER concurrent data structure. Through an orchestration of these key ideas, pi-Lisco is able to lead to significant performance improvements. We complement with an evaluation of pi-Lisco, using the Ford Campus real-world extensive data-set, showing (i) the computational benefits from incrementally processing the consecutive point-clouds; and (ii) the fact that pi-Lisco' parallelization leads to continuously increasing sustainable rates with increasing number of threads, shifting the saturation point of the baseline.