As an important technology in 3D mapping, autonomous driving, and robot navigation, LiDAR odometry is still a challenging task. Appropriate data structure and unsupervised deep learning are the keys to achieve an easy adjusted LiDAR odometry solution with high performance. Utilizing compact 2D structured spherical ring projection model and voxel model which preserves the original shape of input data, we propose a fully unsupervised Convolutional Auto-Encoder based LiDAR Odometry (CAE-LO) that detects interest points from spherical ring data using 2D CAE and extracts features from multi-resolution voxel model using 3D CAE. We make several key contributions: 1) experiments based on KITTI dataset show that our interest points can capture more local details to improve the matching success rate on unstructured scenarios and our features outperform state-of-the-art by more than 50% in matching inlier ratio; 2) besides, we also propose a keyframe selection method based on matching pairs transferring, an odometry refinement method for keyframes based on extended interest points from spherical rings, and a backward pose update method. The odometry refinement experiments verify the proposed ideas' feasibility and effectiveness.
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Worcester Polytechnic Institute（伍斯特理工学院）
Deep learning based LiDAR odometry (LO) estimation attracts increasing research interests in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. Existing works feed consecutive LiDAR frames into neural networks as point clouds and match pairs in the learned feature space. In contrast, motivated by the success of image based feature extractors, we propose to transfer the LiDAR frames to image space and reformulate the problem as image feature extraction. With the help of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) for feature extraction, we are able to generate matched keypoint pairs (MKPs) that can be …
Lidar odometry (LO) is a key technology in numerous reliable and accurate localization and mapping systems of autonomous driving. The state-of-the-art LO methods generally leverage geometric information to perform point cloud registration. Furthermore, obtaining point cloud semantic information which can describe the environment more abundantly will help for the registration. We present a novel semantic lidar odometry method based on self-designed parameterized semantic features (PSFs) to achieve low-drift ego-motion estimation for autonomous vehicle in realtime. We first use a convolutional n…
University of Twente（特文特大学）；Wright State University（莱特州立大学）
LiDAR odometry is a fundamental task for various areas such as robotics, autonomous driving. This problem is difficult since it requires the systems to be highly robust running in noisy real-world data. Existing methods are mostly local iterative methods. Feature-based global registration methods are not preferred since extracting accurate matching pairs in the nonuniform and sparse LiDAR data remains challenging. In this paper, we present Deep Matching LiDAR Odometry (DMLO), a novel learning-based framework which makes the feature matching method applicable to LiDAR odometry task. Unlike many…
LiDAR odometry plays an important role in self-localization and mapping for autonomous navigation, which is usually treated as a scan registration problem. Although having achieved promising performance on KITTI odometry benchmark, the conventional searching tree-based approach still has the difficulty in dealing with the large scale point cloud efficiently. The recent spherical range image-based method enjoys the merits of fast nearest neighbor search by spherical mapping. However, it is not very effective to deal with the ground points nearly parallel to LiDAR beams. To address these issues,…
High-precision lidar odomety is an essential part of autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning methods have been widely used in lidar odomety tasks, but most of the current methods only extract the global features of the point clouds. It is impossible to obtain more detailed point-level features in this way. In addition, only the fully connected layer is used to estimate the pose. The fully connected layer has achieved obvious results in the classification task, but the changes in pose are a continuous rather than discrete process, high-precision pose estimation can not be obtained on…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；College of Intelligence Science and Technology, NUDT（国防科技大学智能科学与技术学院）
Simultaneously odometry and mapping using LiDAR data is an important task for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy in large-scale environments. However, most existing LiDAR-based methods prioritize tracking quality over reconstruction quality. Although the recently developed neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown promising advances in implicit reconstruction for indoor environments, the problem of simultaneous odometry and mapping for large-scale scenarios using incremental LiDAR data remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel NeRF-based LiDAR odometry and m…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence - DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Most LiDAR odometry algorithms estimate the transformation between two consecutive frames by estimating the rotation and translation in an intervening fashion. In this paper, we propose our Decoupled LiDAR Odometry (DeLiO), which -- for the first time -- decouples the rotation estimation completely from the translation estimation. In particular, the rotation is estimated by extracting the surface normals from the input point clouds and tracking their characteristic pattern on a unit sphere. Using this rotation the point clouds are unrotated so that the underlying transformation is pure transla…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）
We present a novel deep convolutional network pipeline, LO-Net, for real-time lidar odometry estimation. Unlike most existing lidar odometry (LO) estimations that go through individually designed feature selection, feature matching, and pose estimation pipeline, LO-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner. With a new mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, LO-Net can effectively learn feature representation for LO estimation, and can implicitly exploit the sequential dependencies and dynamics in the data. We also design a scan-to-map module, which uses the geometric and semantic information…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
A novel 3D point cloud learning model for deep LiDAR odometry, named PWCLO-Net, using hierarchical embedding mask optimization is proposed in this paper. In this model, the Pyramid, Warping, and Cost volume (PWC) structure for the LiDAR odometry task is built to refine the estimated pose in a coarse-to-fine approach hierarchically. An attentive cost volume is built to associate two point clouds and obtain embedding motion patterns. Then, a novel trainable embedding mask is proposed to weigh the local motion patterns of all points to regress the overall pose and filter outlier points. The estim…
Place recognition is a core component of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms. Particularly in visual SLAM systems, previously-visited places are recognized by measuring the appearance similarity between images representing these locations. However, such approaches are sensitive to visual appearance change and also can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach adapting LiDAR descriptors for 3D points obtained from stereo-visual odometry for place recognition. 3D points are potentially more reliable than 2D visual cues (e.g., 2D features)…
Most learning-based methods estimate ego-motion by utilizing visual sensors, which suffer from dramatic lighting variations and textureless scenarios. In this paper, we incorporate sparse but accurate depth measurements obtained from lidars to overcome the limitation of visual methods. To this end, we design a self-supervised visual-lidar odometry (Self-VLO) framework. It takes both monocular images and sparse depth maps projected from 3D lidar points as input, and produces pose and depth estimations in an end-to-end learning manner, without using any ground truth labels. To effectively fuse t…
Scan undistortion is a key module for LiDAR odometry in high dynamic environment with high rotation and translation speed. The existing line of studies mostly focuses on one pass undistortion, which means undistortion for each point is conducted only once in the whole LiDAR-IMU odometry pipeline. In this paper, we propose an optimization based tightly coupled LiDAR-IMU odometry addressing iterated point-level undistortion. By jointly minimizing the cost derived from LiDAR and IMU measurements, our LiDAR-IMU odometry method performs more accurate and robust in high dynamic environment. Besides,…
Institute of Imaging and Computer Vision, RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学图像与计算机视觉研究所）
LiDAR odometry (LO) describes the task of finding an alignment of subsequent LiDAR point clouds. This alignment can be used to estimate the motion of the platform where the LiDAR sensor is mounted on. Currently, on the well-known KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite state-of-the-art algorithms are non-learning approaches. We propose a network architecture that learns LO by directly processing 3D point clouds. It is trained on the KITTI dataset in an end-to-end manner without the necessity of pre-defining corresponding pairs of points. An evaluation on the KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite shows similar per…
An efficient 3D point cloud learning architecture, named EfficientLO-Net, for LiDAR odometry is first proposed in this paper. In this architecture, the projection-aware representation of the 3D point cloud is proposed to organize the raw 3D point cloud into an ordered data form to achieve efficiency. The Pyramid, Warping, and Cost volume (PWC) structure for the LiDAR odometry task is built to estimate and refine the pose in a coarse-to-fine approach. A projection-aware attentive cost volume is built to directly associate two discrete point clouds and obtain embedding motion patterns. Then, a t…
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
In the existing methods, LiDAR odometry shows superior performance, but visual odometry is still widely used for its price advantage. Conventionally, the task of visual odometry mainly rely on the input of continuous images. However, it is very complicated for the odometry network to learn the epipolar geometry information provided by the images. In this paper, the concept of pseudo-LiDAR is introduced into the odometry to solve this problem. The pseudo-LiDAR point cloud back-projects the depth map generated by the image into the 3D point cloud, which changes the way of image representation. C…
KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)（韩国科学技术院）
Numerous researchers have conducted studies to achieve fast and robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry methods for terrestrial mobile platforms. In particular, ground-optimized LiDAR odometry usually employs ground segmentation as a preprocessing method. This is because most of the points in a 3D point cloud captured by a 3D LiDAR sensor on a terrestrial platform are from the ground. However, the effect of the performance of ground segmentation on LiDAR odometry is still not closely examined. In this paper, a robust ground-optimized LiDAR odometry framework is proposed to facilitate the study …
A lidar odometry method, integrating into the computation the knowledge about the physics of the sensor, is proposed. A model of measurement error enables higher precision in estimation of the point normal covariance. Adjacent laser beams are used in an outlier correspondence rejection scheme. The method is ranked in the KITTI's leaderboard with 1.37% positioning error. 3.67% is achieved in comparison with the LOAM method on the internal dataset.
LiDAR odometry is one of the essential parts of LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, existing LiDAR odometry tends to match a new scan simply iteratively with previous fixed-pose scans, gradually accumulating errors. Furthermore, as an effective joint optimization mechanism, bundle adjustment (BA) cannot be directly introduced into real-time odometry due to the intensive computation of large-scale global landmarks. Therefore, this letter designs a new strategy named a landmark map for bundle adjustment odometry (LMBAO) in LiDAR SLAM to solve these problems. First, BA-ba…
RAM-LAB（机器人与自动化实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Ego-motion estimation is a fundamental requirement for most mobile robotic applications. By sensor fusion, we can compensate the deficiencies of stand-alone sensors and provide more reliable estimations. We introduce a tightly coupled lidar-IMU fusion method in this paper. By jointly minimizing the cost derived from lidar and IMU measurements, the lidar-IMU odometry (LIO) can perform well with acceptable drift after long-term experiment, even in challenging cases where the lidar measurements can be degraded. Besides, to obtain more reliable estimations of the lidar poses, a rotation-constraine…
LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM) has been playing an important role in autonomous vehicles, due to its ability to simultaneously localize the robot's pose and build high-precision, high-resolution maps of the surrounding environment. This enables autonomous navigation and safe path planning of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a robust, real-time LOAM algorithm for LiDARs with small FoV and irregular samplings. By taking effort on both front-end and back-end, we address several fundamental challenges arising from such LiDARs, and achieve better performance in both precision and e…
For autonomous vehicles, high-precision real-time localization is the guarantee of stable driving. Compared with the visual odometry (VO), the LiDAR odometry (LO) has the advantages of higher accuracy and better stability. However, 2D LO is only suitable for the indoor environment, and 3D LO has less efficiency in general. Both are not suitable for the online localization of an autonomous vehicle in an outdoor driving environment. In this paper, a direct LO method based on the 2.5D grid map is proposed. The fast semi-dense direct method proposed for VO is employed to register two 2.5D maps. Ex…
Multi-LVI-SAM: A Robust LiDAR-Visual-Inertial Odometry for Multiple Fisheye Cameras
Department of Computer Science and Technology, School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University（电子信息工程学院计算机科学与技术系）；MOE Key Lab of Embedded System and Service Computing, Tongji University（教育部嵌入式系统与服务计算重点实验室）；Institute of Intelligent Vehicles, Tongji University（智能车辆研究院）
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is an essential capability for autonomous robots, but due to high data rates of 3D LiDARs real-time SLAM is challenging. We propose a real-time method for 6D LiDAR odometry. Our approach combines a continuous-time B-Spline trajectory representation with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) formulation to jointly align local multi-resolution surfel maps. Sparse voxel grids and permutohedral lattices ensure fast access to map surfels, and an adaptive resolution selection scheme effectively speeds up registration. A thorough experimental evaluation shows the…
Recently, learning-based ego-motion estimation approaches have drawn strong interest from studies mostly focusing on visual perception. These groundbreaking works focus on unsupervised learning for odometry estimation but mostly for visual sensors. Compared to images, a learning-based approach using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has been reported in a few studies where, most often, a supervised learning framework is proposed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to geometry-aware deep LiDAR odometry trainable via both supervised and unsupervised frameworks. We incorporate the Itera…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；PCA Lab（PCA实验室）
Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to deep learning based odometry. Nonetheless, few efforts are made on the unsupervised deep lidar odometry. In this paper, we design a novel framework for unsupervised lidar odometry with the IMU, which is never used in other deep methods. First, a pair of siamese LSTMs are used to obtain the initial pose from the linear acceleration and angular velocity of IMU. With the initial pose, we perform the rigid transform on the current frame and align it closer to the last frame. Then, we extract vertex and normal features from the transformed point clo…
In this paper, we present a multi-camera visual odometry (VO) system for an autonomous vehicle. Our system mainly consists of a virtual LiDAR and a pose tracker. We use a perspective transformation method to synthesize a surround-view image from undistorted fisheye camera images. With a semantic segmentation model, the free space can be extracted. The scans of the virtual LiDAR are generated by discretizing the contours of the free space. As for the pose tracker, we propose a visual odometry system fusing both the feature matching and the virtual LiDAR scan matching results. Only those feature…
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学产业技术研究所）；Microsoft（微软）
In this paper, we propose a method of targetless and automatic Camera-LiDAR calibration. Our approach is an extension of hand-eye calibration framework to 2D-3D calibration. By using the sensor fusion odometry method, the scaled camera motions are calculated with high accuracy. In addition to this, we clarify the suitable motion for this calibration method. The proposed method only requires the three-dimensional point cloud and the camera image and does not need other information such as reflectance of LiDAR and to give initial extrinsic parameter. In the experiments, we demonstrate our method…
This paper presents a loop closure method to correct the long-term drift in LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM). Our proposed method computes the 2D histogram of keyframes, a local map patch, and uses the normalized cross-correlation of the 2D histograms as the similarity metric between the current keyframe and those in the map. We show that this method is fast, invariant to rotation, and produces reliable and accurate loop detection. The proposed method is implemented with careful engineering and integrated into the LOAM algorithm, forming a complete and practical system ready to use. To benefi…
MTA SZTAKI, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Computer Science and Control（匈牙利科学院计算机科学与控制研究所）
In this paper we deal with the problem of odometry and localization for Lidar-equipped vehicles driving in urban environments, where a premade target map exists to localize against. In our problem formulation, to correct the accumulated drift of the Lidar-only odometry we apply a place recognition method to detect geometrically similar locations between the online 3D point cloud and the a priori offline map. In the proposed system, we integrate a state-of-the-art Lidar-only odometry algorithm with a recently proposed 3D point segment matching method by complementing their advantages. Also, we …
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Combining multiple LiDARs enables a robot to maximize its perceptual awareness of environments and obtain sufficient measurements, which is promising for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This paper proposes a system to achieve robust and simultaneous extrinsic calibration, odometry, and mapping for multiple LiDARs. Our approach starts with measurement preprocessing to extract edge and planar features from raw measurements. After a motion and extrinsic initialization procedure, a sliding window-based multi-LiDAR odometry runs onboard to estimate poses with online calibration refine…
Multi-beam LiDAR sensors are increasingly used in robotics, particularly with autonomous cars for localization and perception tasks, both relying on the ability to build a precise map of the environment. For this, we propose a new real-time LiDAR-only odometry method called CT-ICP (for Continuous-Time ICP), completed into a full SLAM with a novel loop detection procedure. The core of this method, is the introduction of the combined continuity in the scan matching, and discontinuity between scans. It allows both the elastic distortion of the scan during the registration for increased precision,…
Multimedia Laboratory, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学多媒体实验室）；State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学CAD&CG国家重点实验室）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Recent learning-based LiDAR odometry methods have demonstrated their competitiveness. However, most methods still face two substantial challenges: 1) the 2D projection representation of LiDAR data cannot effectively encode 3D structures from the point clouds; 2) the needs for a large amount of labeled data for training limit the application scope of these methods. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised LiDAR odometry method, dubbed SelfVoxeLO, to tackle these two difficulties. Specifically, we propose a 3D convolution network to process the raw LiDAR data directly, which extracts features…
Dense-depth map guided deep Lidar-Visual Odometry with Sparse Point Clouds and Images
College of Physics and Optical Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学物理与光学工程学院）；Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen（清华大学深圳研究院）；YunJiZhiHui Engineering Co., Ltd.（云智慧工程有限公司）；Quantum Science Center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area（粤港澳大湾区量子科学中心）；State Key Laboratory of Radio Frequency Heterogeneous Integration, Shenzhen University（深圳大学射频异构集成重点实验室）；Institute of Intelligent Optical Measurement and Detection, Shenzhen University（深圳大学智能光学测量与探测研究所）
Attention-Guided Lidar Segmentation and Odometry Using Image-to-Point Cloud Saliency Transfer
University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory (JRL)（法国国家科学研究中心-日本产业技术综合研究所联合机器人实验室）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
The correct ego-motion estimation basically relies on the understanding of correspondences between adjacent LiDAR scans. However, given the complex scenarios and the low-resolution LiDAR, finding reliable structures for identifying correspondences can be challenging. In this paper, we delve into structure reliability for accurate self-supervised ego-motion estimation and aim to alleviate the influence of unreliable structures in training, inference and mapping phases. We improve the self-supervised LiDAR odometry substantially from three aspects: 1) A two-stage odometry estimation network is d…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Scania AB（斯堪尼亚公司）
We present an efficient multi-sensor odometry system for mobile platforms that jointly optimizes visual, lidar, and inertial information within a single integrated factor graph. This runs in real-time at full framerate using fixed lag smoothing. To perform such tight integration, a new method to extract 3D line and planar primitives from lidar point clouds is presented. This approach overcomes the suboptimality of typical frame-to-frame tracking methods by treating the primitives as landmarks and tracking them over multiple scans. True integration of lidar features with standard visual feature…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高科矿业学院）；PSL University（巴黎文理研究大学）；Kitware（凯图尔公司）；Centre for robotics（机器人中心）
With the democratization of 3D LiDAR sensors, precise LiDAR odometries and SLAM are in high demand. New methods regularly appear, proposing solutions ranging from small variations in classical algorithms to radically new paradigms based on deep learning. Yet it is often difficult to compare these methods, notably due to the few datasets on which the methods can be evaluated and compared. Furthermore, their weaknesses are rarely examined, often letting the user discover the hard way whether a method would be appropriate for a use case. In this paper, we review and organize the main 3D LiDAR odo…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University of Sao Paulo（圣保罗大学）
This paper describes an end-to-end pipeline for tree diameter estimation based on semantic segmentation and lidar odometry and mapping. Accurate mapping of this type of environment is challenging since the ground and the trees are surrounded by leaves, thorns and vines, and the sensor typically experiences extreme motion. We propose a semantic feature based pose optimization that simultaneously refines the tree models while estimating the robot pose. The pipeline utilizes a custom virtual reality tool for labeling 3D scans that is used to train a semantic segmentation network. The masked point…
