TreeLoc++: Robust 6-DoF LiDAR Localization in Forests with a Compact Digital Forest Inventory

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Jung, Minwoo, Lee, Dongjae, Chebrolu, Nived, Oh, Haedam, Fallon, Maurice, Kim, Ayoung
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Jung, Minwoo
Lee, Dongjae
Chebrolu, Nived
Oh, Haedam
Fallon, Maurice
Kim, Ayoung
author_facet Jung, Minwoo
Lee, Dongjae
Chebrolu, Nived
Oh, Haedam
Fallon, Maurice
Kim, Ayoung
contents Reliable localization is essential for sustainable forest management, as it allows robots or sensor systems to revisit and monitor the status of individual trees over long periods. In modern forestry, this management is structured around Digital Forest Inventories (DFIs), which encode stems using compact geometric attributes rather than raw data. Despite their central role, DFIs have been overlooked in localization research, and most methods still rely on dense gigabyte-sized point clouds that are costly to store and maintain. To improve upon this, we propose TreeLoc++, a global localization framework that operates directly on DFIs as a discriminative representation, eliminating the need to use the raw point clouds. TreeLoc++ reduces false matches in structurally ambiguous forests and improves the reliability of full 6-DoF pose estimation. It augments coarse retrieval with a pairwise distance histogram that encodes local tree-layout context, subsequently refining candidates via DBH-based filtering and yaw-consistent inlier selection to further reduce mismatches. Furthermore, a constrained optimization leveraging tree geometry jointly estimates roll, pitch, and height, enhancing pose stability and enabling accurate localization without reliance on dense 3D point cloud data. Evaluations on 27 sequences recorded in forests across three datasets and four countries show that TreeLoc++ achieves precise localization with centimeter-level accuracy. We further demonstrate robustness to long-term change by localizing data recorded in 2025 against inventories built from 2023 data, spanning a two-year interval. The system represents 15 sessions spanning 7.98 km of trajectories using only 250KB of map data and outperforms both hand-crafted and learning-based baselines that rely on point cloud maps. This demonstrates the scalability of TreeLoc++ for long-term deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03695
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TreeLoc++: Robust 6-DoF LiDAR Localization in Forests with a Compact Digital Forest Inventory
Jung, Minwoo
Lee, Dongjae
Chebrolu, Nived
Oh, Haedam
Fallon, Maurice
Kim, Ayoung
Robotics
Reliable localization is essential for sustainable forest management, as it allows robots or sensor systems to revisit and monitor the status of individual trees over long periods. In modern forestry, this management is structured around Digital Forest Inventories (DFIs), which encode stems using compact geometric attributes rather than raw data. Despite their central role, DFIs have been overlooked in localization research, and most methods still rely on dense gigabyte-sized point clouds that are costly to store and maintain. To improve upon this, we propose TreeLoc++, a global localization framework that operates directly on DFIs as a discriminative representation, eliminating the need to use the raw point clouds. TreeLoc++ reduces false matches in structurally ambiguous forests and improves the reliability of full 6-DoF pose estimation. It augments coarse retrieval with a pairwise distance histogram that encodes local tree-layout context, subsequently refining candidates via DBH-based filtering and yaw-consistent inlier selection to further reduce mismatches. Furthermore, a constrained optimization leveraging tree geometry jointly estimates roll, pitch, and height, enhancing pose stability and enabling accurate localization without reliance on dense 3D point cloud data. Evaluations on 27 sequences recorded in forests across three datasets and four countries show that TreeLoc++ achieves precise localization with centimeter-level accuracy. We further demonstrate robustness to long-term change by localizing data recorded in 2025 against inventories built from 2023 data, spanning a two-year interval. The system represents 15 sessions spanning 7.98 km of trajectories using only 250KB of map data and outperforms both hand-crafted and learning-based baselines that rely on point cloud maps. This demonstrates the scalability of TreeLoc++ for long-term deployment.
title TreeLoc++: Robust 6-DoF LiDAR Localization in Forests with a Compact Digital Forest Inventory
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03695