Place recognition is essential to maintain global consistency in large-scale localization systems. While research in urban environments has progressed significantly using LiDARs or cameras, applications in natural forest-like environments remain largely under-explored. Furthermore, forests present particular challenges due to high self-similarity and substantial variations in vegetation growth over time. In this work, we propose a robust LiDAR-based place recognition method for natural forests, ForestLPR. We hypothesize that a set of cross-sectional images of the forest's geometry at different heights contains the information needed to recognize revisiting a place. The cross-sectional images are represented by \ac{bev} density images of horizontal slices of the point cloud at different heights. Our approach utilizes a visual transformer as the shared backbone to produce sets of local descriptors and introduces a multi-BEV interaction module to attend to information at different heights adaptively. It is followed by an aggregation layer that produces a rotation-invariant place descriptor. We evaluated the efficacy of our method extensively on real-world data from public benchmarks as well as robotic datasets and compared it against the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The results indicate that ForestLPR has consistently good performance on all evaluations and achieves an average increase of 7.38\% and 9.11\% on Recall@1 over the closest competitor on intra-sequence loop closure detection and inter-sequence re-localization, respectively, validating our hypothesis
BEV-LIO(LC): BEV Image Assisted LiDAR-Inertial Odometry with Loop Closure
School of Computer Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，广东技术大学）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（电子与电气工程学院，南洋理工大学）
BEVPlace++: Fast, Robust, and Lightweight LiDAR Global Localization for Unmanned Ground Vehicles
College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（智能科学与技术学院，国防科技大学）；Haomo.AI Technology Co., Ltd（哈莫人工智能技术有限公司）；Ningbo Innovation Center, Zhejiang University（宁波创新中心，浙江大学）；College of Instrument Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, Beihang University（仪器科学与光电工程学院，北航）；College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（信息科学与电子工程学院，浙江大学）
Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics (DCMLR), Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin（达赫姆机器学习与机器人研究中心（DCMLR），数学与计算机科学系，柏林自由大学）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
3D object tracking in point clouds is still a challenging problem due to the sparsity of LiDAR points in dynamic environments. In this work, we propose a Siamese voxel-to-BEV tracker, which can significantly improve the tracking performance in sparse 3D point clouds. Specifically, it consists of a Siamese shape-aware feature learning network and a voxel-to-BEV target localization network. The Siamese shape-aware feature learning network can capture 3D shape information of the object to learn the discriminative features of the object so that the potential target from the background in sparse po…
RING#: PR-by-PE Global Localization with Roto-translation Equivariant Gram Learning
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院（ cyber系统与控制研究所））；School of Astronautics, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学宇航学院）；College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学智能科学学院）
Integrating LiDAR and Camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) has become an essential topic for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Existing methods mostly adopt an independent dual-branch framework to generate LiDAR and camera BEV, then perform an adaptive modality fusion. Since point clouds provide more accurate localization and geometry information, they could serve as a reliable spatial prior to acquiring relevant semantic information from the images. Therefore, we design a LiDAR-Guided View Transformer (LGVT) to effectively obtain the camera representation in BEV space and th…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Intel Lab China（英特尔中国研究院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Recently, Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has gained increasing attention in multi-view 3D object detection, which has demonstrated promising applications in autonomous driving. Although multi-view camera systems can be deployed at low cost, the lack of depth information makes current approaches adopt large models for good performance. Therefore, it is essential to improve the efficiency of BEV 3D object detection. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is one of the most practical techniques to train efficient yet accurate models. However, BEV KD is still under-explored to the best of our knowledge…
S-BEVLoc: BEV-based Self-supervised Framework for Large-scale LiDAR Global Localization
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Ningbo Innovation Center, Zhejiang University（浙江大学宁波创新中心）；College of Information Engineering, China Jiliang University（中国浙江师范大学信息工程学院）；Jinhua Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学金华研究院）
Matched Filtering based LiDAR Place Recognition for Urban and Natural Environments
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；QUT Centre for Robotics（昆士兰科技大学机器人中心）；School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics（电气工程与机器人学院）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
Center for Mathematical Morphology (CMM) - MINES ParisTech - PSL Research University（数学形态学中心（CMM）- 巴黎高等矿业学院 - PSL研究大学）；NavyaTech（Navya科技公司）；Terra3D（Terra3D公司）
Point cloud datasets for perception tasks in the context of autonomous driving often rely on high resolution 64-layer Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) scanners. They are expensive to deploy on real-world autonomous driving sensor architectures which usually employ 16/32 layer LIDARs. We evaluate the effect of subsampling image based representations of dense point clouds on the accuracy of the road segmentation task. In our experiments the low resolution 16/32 layer LIDAR point clouds are simulated by subsampling the original 64 layer data, for subsequent transformation in to a feature map i…
GraphBEV: Towards Robust BEV Feature Alignment for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection
School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机与信息技术学院）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与 mobility学院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学机械工程学院）
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Syracuse University（雪城大学）
3D object detection from LiDAR data for autonomous driving has been making remarkable strides in recent years. Among the state-of-the-art methodologies, encoding point clouds into a bird's eye view (BEV) has been demonstrated to be both effective and efficient. Different from perspective views, BEV preserves rich spatial and distance information between objects. Yet, while farther objects of the same type do not appear smaller in the BEV, they contain sparser point cloud features. This fact weakens BEV feature extraction using shared-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In order to add…
Semantics-Guided Multimodal Masked Autoencoder Pretraining for 3D BEV Object Detection
University of Lincoln, Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems（林肯大学，林肯自主系统中心）；University of Cambridge, Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering（剑桥大学，制造研究所，工程系）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
3D object detection from multiple image views is a fundamental and challenging task for visual scene understanding. Owing to its low cost and high efficiency, multi-view 3D object detection has demonstrated promising application prospects. However, accurately detecting objects through perspective views is extremely difficult due to the lack of depth information. Current approaches tend to adopt heavy backbones for image encoders, making them inapplicable for real-world deployment. Different from the images, LiDAR points are superior in providing spatial cues, resulting in highly precise locali…
Peking University（北京大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D Object Detection is a crucial multi-view technique for autonomous driving systems. Recently, plenty of works are proposed, following a similar paradigm consisting of three essential components, i.e., camera feature extraction, BEV feature construction, and task heads. Among the three components, BEV feature construction is BEV-specific compared with 2D tasks. Existing methods aggregate the multi-view camera features to the flattened grid in order to construct the BEV feature. However, flattening the BEV space along the height dimension fails to emphasize the informativ…
BEVPose: Unveiling Scene Semantics through Pose-Guided Multi-Modal BEV Alignment
Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Robust real-time detection and motion forecasting of traffic participants is necessary for autonomous vehicles to safely navigate urban environments. In this paper, we present RV-FuseNet, a novel end-to-end approach for joint detection and trajectory estimation directly from time-series LiDAR data. Instead of the widely used bird's eye view (BEV) representation, we utilize the native range view (RV) representation of LiDAR data. The RV preserves the full resolution of the sensor by avoiding the voxelization used in the BEV. Furthermore, RV can be processed efficiently due to its compactness. P…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Building 3D perception systems for autonomous vehicles that do not rely on high-density LiDAR is a critical research problem because of the expense of LiDAR systems compared to cameras and other sensors. Recent research has developed a variety of camera-only methods, where features are differentiably "lifted" from the multi-camera images onto the 2D ground plane, yielding a "bird's eye view" (BEV) feature representation of the 3D space around the vehicle. This line of work has produced a variety of novel "lifting" methods, but we observe that other details in the training setups have shifted a…
We present a simple yet effective fully convolutional one-stage 3D object detector for LiDAR point clouds of autonomous driving scenes, termed FCOS-LiDAR. Unlike the dominant methods that use the bird-eye view (BEV), our proposed detector detects objects from the range view (RV, a.k.a. range image) of the LiDAR points. Due to the range view's compactness and compatibility with the LiDAR sensors' sampling process on self-driving cars, the range view-based object detector can be realized by solely exploiting the vanilla 2D convolutions, departing from the BEV-based methods which often involve co…
ContrastAlign: Toward Robust BEV Feature Alignment via Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection
School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, Beijing Jiaotong University（计算机科学与技术学院，北京交通大数据挖掘与具身智能重点实验室，北京交通大学）；Horizon Robotics；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University（信息科学与工程学院，燕山大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，哈尔滨理工大学）；School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland（信息技术与电气工程学院，昆士兰大学）
