ForestLPR: LiDAR Place Recognition in Forests Attentioning Multiple BEV Density Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shen, Yanqing, Tuna, Turcan, Hutter, Marco, Cadena, Cesar, Zheng, Nanning
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Shen, Yanqing
Tuna, Turcan
Hutter, Marco
Cadena, Cesar
Zheng, Nanning
author_facet Shen, Yanqing
Tuna, Turcan
Hutter, Marco
Cadena, Cesar
Zheng, Nanning
contents 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
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04475
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ForestLPR: LiDAR Place Recognition in Forests Attentioning Multiple BEV Density Images
Shen, Yanqing
Tuna, Turcan
Hutter, Marco
Cadena, Cesar
Zheng, Nanning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
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
title ForestLPR: LiDAR Place Recognition in Forests Attentioning Multiple BEV Density Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04475