Concerning the problems of 3D point cloud data processing and on-road obstacle detection based on Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), a deep learning-based on-road obstacle detection method was proposed. First, the statistical filtering algorithm was applied to eliminate the outliers from the original point cloud, improving the roughness of point clouds. Then, an end-to-end deep neural network named VNMax was proposed, the max pooling was used to optimize the structure of Region Proposal Network (RPN), and an improved target detection layer was built. Finally, training and testing experiments were performed on KITTI dataset. The results show that, by filtering, the average distance between the points in point cloud is reduced effectively. For the car location processing results of easy, medium difficult and hard detection tasks in KITTI dataset, it can be seen that the average precisions of the proposed method are improved by 11.30 percentage points, 6.02 percentage points and 3.89 percentage points, respectively, compared with those of the VoxelNet. Experimental results show that the statistical filtering algorithm is still an effective 3D point cloud data processing method, and the max pooling module can improve the learning performance and object location ability of the deep neural network.