Robust Place Recognition using an Imaging Lidar

Tixiao Shan, Brendan Englot, Fábio Duarte, Carlo Ratti, Daniela Rus

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a methodology for robust, real-time place recognition using an imaging lidar, which yields image-quality high-resolution 3D point clouds. Utilizing the intensity readings of an imaging lidar, we project the point cloud and obtain an intensity image. ORB feature descriptors are extracted from the image and encoded into a bag-of-words vector. The vector, used to identify the point cloud, is inserted into a database that is maintained by DBoW for fast place recognition queries. The returned candidate is further validated by matching visual feature descriptors. To reject matching outliers, we apply PnP, which minimizes the reprojection error of visual features' positions in Euclidean space with their correspondences in 2D image space, using RANSAC. Combining the advantages from both camera and lidar-based place recognition approaches, our method is truly rotation-invariant, and can tackle reverse revisiting and upside down revisiting. The proposed method is evaluated on datasets gathered from a variety of platforms over different scales and environments. Our implementation and datasets are available at https://git.io/image-lidar.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
Pages5469-5475
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781728190778
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021 - Xi'an, China
Duration: 30 May 20215 Jun 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Volume2021-May
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period30/05/215/06/21

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Robust Place Recognition using an Imaging Lidar'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this