ReasonPedestrian recognition has great practical value and is a vital step toward applying path planning and intelligent obstacle avoidance in autonomous driving. In recent years, laser radar has played an essential role in pedestrian detection and recognition in unmanned driving. More accurate high spatial dimension and high-resolution data could be obtained by building a three-dimensional point cloud. However, the point cloud data collected by laser radar is often massive and contains a lot of redundancy, which is not conducive to transmission and storage. So, the processing speed grows slow when the original point cloud data is used for recognition. On the other hand, the compression processing of many laser radar point clouds could save computing power and speed up the recognition processing.MethodologyThe article utilizes the fusion point cloud data from laser radar to investigate the fast pedestrian recognition algorithm. The focus is to compress the collected point cloud data based on the boundary and feature value extraction and then use the point cloud pedestrian recognition algorithm based on image mapping to detect pedestrians. This article proposes a point cloud data compression method based on feature point extraction and reduced voxel grid.ResultsThe Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute data set is used to investigate the proposed algorithm experimentally. The outcomes indicate that the peak signal-to-noise ratio of the compression algorithm is improved by 6.02%. The recognition accuracy is improved by 16.93%, 17.2%, and 16.12%, corresponding to simple, medium, and difficult scenes, respectively, when compared with the point cloud pedestrian recognition method based on image mapping, which uses the random sampling method to compress the point cloud data.ConclusionThe proposed method could achieve data compression better and ensure that many feature points are retained in the compressed Point Cloud Data (PCD). Thus, the compressed PCD achieves pedestrian recognition through an image-based mapping recognition algorithm.