RaLF: Flow-based Global and Metric Radar Localization in LiDAR Maps

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Hauptverfasser: Nayak, Abhijeet, Cattaneo, Daniele, Valada, Abhinav
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Nayak, Abhijeet
Cattaneo, Daniele
Valada, Abhinav
author_facet Nayak, Abhijeet
Cattaneo, Daniele
Valada, Abhinav
contents Localization is paramount for autonomous robots. While camera and LiDAR-based approaches have been extensively investigated, they are affected by adverse illumination and weather conditions. Therefore, radar sensors have recently gained attention due to their intrinsic robustness to such conditions. In this paper, we propose RaLF, a novel deep neural network-based approach for localizing radar scans in a LiDAR map of the environment, by jointly learning to address both place recognition and metric localization. RaLF is composed of radar and LiDAR feature encoders, a place recognition head that generates global descriptors, and a metric localization head that predicts the 3-DoF transformation between the radar scan and the map. We tackle the place recognition task by learning a shared embedding space between the two modalities via cross-modal metric learning. Additionally, we perform metric localization by predicting pixel-level flow vectors that align the query radar scan with the LiDAR map. We extensively evaluate our approach on multiple real-world driving datasets and show that RaLF achieves state-of-the-art performance for both place recognition and metric localization. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach can effectively generalize to different cities and sensor setups than the ones used during training. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://ralf.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_09875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RaLF: Flow-based Global and Metric Radar Localization in LiDAR Maps
Nayak, Abhijeet
Cattaneo, Daniele
Valada, Abhinav
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Localization is paramount for autonomous robots. While camera and LiDAR-based approaches have been extensively investigated, they are affected by adverse illumination and weather conditions. Therefore, radar sensors have recently gained attention due to their intrinsic robustness to such conditions. In this paper, we propose RaLF, a novel deep neural network-based approach for localizing radar scans in a LiDAR map of the environment, by jointly learning to address both place recognition and metric localization. RaLF is composed of radar and LiDAR feature encoders, a place recognition head that generates global descriptors, and a metric localization head that predicts the 3-DoF transformation between the radar scan and the map. We tackle the place recognition task by learning a shared embedding space between the two modalities via cross-modal metric learning. Additionally, we perform metric localization by predicting pixel-level flow vectors that align the query radar scan with the LiDAR map. We extensively evaluate our approach on multiple real-world driving datasets and show that RaLF achieves state-of-the-art performance for both place recognition and metric localization. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach can effectively generalize to different cities and sensor setups than the ones used during training. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://ralf.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
title RaLF: Flow-based Global and Metric Radar Localization in LiDAR Maps
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09875