BEVPlace: Learning LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Bird's Eye View Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Luo, Lun, Zheng, Shuhang, Li, Yixuan, Fan, Yongzhi, Yu, Beinan, Cao, Siyuan, Shen, Huiliang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Luo, Lun
Zheng, Shuhang
Li, Yixuan
Fan, Yongzhi
Yu, Beinan
Cao, Siyuan
Shen, Huiliang
author_facet Luo, Lun
Zheng, Shuhang
Li, Yixuan
Fan, Yongzhi
Yu, Beinan
Cao, Siyuan
Shen, Huiliang
contents Place recognition is a key module for long-term SLAM systems. Current LiDAR-based place recognition methods usually use representations of point clouds such as unordered points or range images. These methods achieve high recall rates of retrieval, but their performance may degrade in the case of view variation or scene changes. In this work, we explore the potential of a different representation in place recognition, i.e. bird's eye view (BEV) images. We observe that the structural contents of BEV images are less influenced by rotations and translations of point clouds. We validate that, without any delicate design, a simple VGGNet trained on BEV images achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art place recognition methods in scenes of slight viewpoint changes. For more robust place recognition, we design a rotation-invariant network called BEVPlace. We use group convolution to extract rotation-equivariant local features from the images and NetVLAD for global feature aggregation. In addition, we observe that the distance between BEV features is correlated with the geometry distance of point clouds. Based on the observation, we develop a method to estimate the position of the query cloud, extending the usage of place recognition. The experiments conducted on large-scale public datasets show that our method 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recall rates, 2) is robust to view changes, 3) shows strong generalization ability, and 4) can estimate the positions of query point clouds. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_14325
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BEVPlace: Learning LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Bird's Eye View Images
Luo, Lun
Zheng, Shuhang
Li, Yixuan
Fan, Yongzhi
Yu, Beinan
Cao, Siyuan
Shen, Huiliang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Place recognition is a key module for long-term SLAM systems. Current LiDAR-based place recognition methods usually use representations of point clouds such as unordered points or range images. These methods achieve high recall rates of retrieval, but their performance may degrade in the case of view variation or scene changes. In this work, we explore the potential of a different representation in place recognition, i.e. bird's eye view (BEV) images. We observe that the structural contents of BEV images are less influenced by rotations and translations of point clouds. We validate that, without any delicate design, a simple VGGNet trained on BEV images achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art place recognition methods in scenes of slight viewpoint changes. For more robust place recognition, we design a rotation-invariant network called BEVPlace. We use group convolution to extract rotation-equivariant local features from the images and NetVLAD for global feature aggregation. In addition, we observe that the distance between BEV features is correlated with the geometry distance of point clouds. Based on the observation, we develop a method to estimate the position of the query cloud, extending the usage of place recognition. The experiments conducted on large-scale public datasets show that our method 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recall rates, 2) is robust to view changes, 3) shows strong generalization ability, and 4) can estimate the positions of query point clouds. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace.
title BEVPlace: Learning LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Bird's Eye View Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14325