Place recognition and loop-closure detection are main challenges in the localization, mapping and navigation tasks of self-driving vehicles. In this paper, we solve the loop-closure detection problem by incorporating the deep-learning based point cloud description method and the coarse-to-fine sequence matching strategy. More specifically, we propose a deep neural network to extract a global descriptor from the original large-scale 3D point cloud, then based on which, a typical place analysis approach is presented to investigate the feature space distribution of the global descriptors and select several super keyframes. Finally, a coarse-to-fine strategy, which includes a super keyframe based coarse matching stage and a local sequence matching stage, is presented to ensure the loop-closure detection accuracy and real-time performance simultaneously. Thanks to the sequence matching operation, the proposed approach obtains an improvement against the existing deep-learning based methods. Experiment results on a self-driving vehicle validate the effectiveness of the proposed loop-closure detection algorithm.
Handcrafted local features, such as Shape context @cite_21 and SHOT @cite_9 , first find a keypoint, divide neighboring points into different bins, and encode a histogram with the defined pattern of neighboring bins. Moreover, FPHF @cite_5 , present for 2.5D scans, which is a point-wise histogram based 3D feature descriptor. Global descriptors of the local point cloud were also presented. M2DP was proposed in @cite_13 , which projects the original point cloud to several planes and extracts a global representation. ESF @cite_8 implemented the concatenation of histograms generated from shape functions. Local features usually require normal vectors of keypoints and thus are not suitable for large-scale place recognition tasks in outdoor scenarios. Global descriptors are usually tailored to specific tasks and therefore have poor generalization features.
@cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_5 @cite_13
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We present an algorithm for registration between a large-scale point cloud and a close-proximity scanned point cloud, providing a localization solution that is fully independent of prior information about the initial positions of the two point cloud coordinate systems. The algorithm, denoted LORAX, selects super-points&#x2013;local subsets of points&#x2013;and describes the geometric structure of each with a low-dimensional descriptor. These descriptors are then used to infer potential matching regions for an efficient coarse registration process, followed by a fine-tuning stage. The set of super-points is selected by covering the point clouds with overlapping spheres, and then filtering out those of low-quality or nonsalient regions. The descriptors are computed using state-of-the-art unsupervised machine learning, utilizing the technology of deep neural network based auto-encoders. Abstract This novel framework provides a strong alternative to the common practice of using manually designed key-point descriptors for coarse point cloud registration. Utilizing super-points instead of key-points allows the available geometrical data to be better exploited to find the correct transformation. Encoding local 3D geometric structures using a deep neural network auto-encoder instead of traditional descriptors continues the trend seen in other computer vision applications and indeed leads to superior results. The algorithm is tested on challenging point cloud registration datasets, and its advantages over previous approaches as well as its robustness to density changes, noise, and missing data are shown. In our recent work [1], [2], we proposed Point Feature Histograms (PFH) as robust multi-dimensional features which describe the local geometry around a point p for 3D point cloud datasets. In this paper, we modify their mathematical expressions and perform a rigorous analysis on their robustness and complexity for the problem of 3D registration for overlapping point cloud views. More concretely, we present several optimizations that reduce their computation times drastically by either caching previously computed values or by revising their theoretical formulations. The latter results in a new type of local features, called Fast Point Feature Histograms (FPFH), which retain most of the discriminative power of the PFH. Moreover, we propose an algorithm for the online computation of FPFH features for realtime applications. To validate our results we demonstrate their efficiency for 3D registration and propose a new sample consensus based method for bringing two datasets into the convergence basin of a local non-linear optimizer: SAC-IA (SAmple Consensus Initial Alignment). Recently, 3D understanding research sheds light on extracting features from point cloud directly, which requires effective shape pattern description of point clouds. Inspired by the outstanding 2D shape descriptor SIFT, we design a module called PointSIFT that encodes information of different orientations and is adaptive to scale of shape. Specifically, an orientation-encoding unit is designed to describe eight crucial orientations, and multi-scale representation is achieved by stacking several orientation-encoding units. PointSIFT module can be integrated into various PointNet-based architecture to improve the representation ability. Extensive experiments show our PointSIFT-based framework outperforms state-of-the-art method on standard benchmark datasets. The code and trained model will be published accompanied by this paper. In this work, we propose and experiment an original solution to 3D face recognition that supports face matching also in the case of probe scans with missing parts. In the proposed approach, distinguishing traits of the face are captured by first extracting 3D keypoints of the scan and then measuring how the face surface changes in the keypoints neighborhood using local shape descriptors. In particular: 3D keypoints detection relies on the adaptation to the case of 3D faces of the meshDOG algorithm that has been demonstrated to be effective for 3D keypoints extraction from generic objects; as 3D local descriptors we used the HOG descriptor and also proposed two alternative solutions that develop, respectively, on the histogram of orientations and the geometric histogram descriptors. Face similarity is evaluated by comparing local shape descriptors across inlier pairs of matching keypoints between probe and gallery scans. The face recognition accuracy of the approach has been first experimented on the difficult probes included in the new 2D 3D Florence face dataset that has been recently collected and released at the University of Firenze, and on the Binghamton University 3D facial expression dataset. Then, a comprehensive comparative evaluation has been performed on the Bosphorus, Gavab and UND FRGC v2.0 databases, where competitive results with respect to existing solutions for 3D face biometrics have been obtained. Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted Highlights3D face recognition approach deployable in real non-cooperative contexts of use.Fully-3D approach, based on keypoints detection, description and matching.MeshDOG keypoints detector combined with the multi-ring GH descriptor.RANSAC algorithm included for outlier removal from matching keypoints.State of the art accuracy for recognizing 3D scans with missing parts.