Localization in challenging, natural environments such as forests or woodlands is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld sensors. In this work we explore laser-based localization in both urban and natural environments, which is suitable for online applications. We propose a deep learning approach capable of learning meaningful descriptors directly from 3D point clouds by comparing triplets (anchor, positive and negative examples). The approach learns a feature space representation for a set of segmented point clouds that are matched between a current and previous observations. Our learning method is tailored towards loop closure detection resulting in a small model which can be deployed using only a CPU. The proposed learning method would allow the full pipeline to run on robots with limited computational payload such as drones, quadrupeds or UGVs.
@cite_33 a query point cloud is downsampled and matched against a collection of previously collected submaps globally. All clouds are described on a GPU using a combination of networks trained with a lazy quadruplet loss to produce a 256-dimensional feature vector. In contrast, we firstly segment the query and map point clouds to produce a small set of segments, local keypoints. The segments are then described in real time on a CPU. Thus, our approach uses a combination of local features for each segment and matches those in the map. In this way we are robust to disturbances from occlusions and changing environments.
@cite_33
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Learning and analyzing 3D point clouds with deep networks is challenging due to the sparseness and irregularity of the data. In this paper, we present a data-driven point cloud upsampling technique. The key idea is to learn multi-level features per point and expand the point set via a multi-branch convolution unit implicitly in feature space. The expanded feature is then split to a multitude of features, which are then reconstructed to an upsampled point set. Our network is applied at a patch-level, with a joint loss function that encourages the upsampled points to remain on the underlying surface with a uniform distribution. We conduct various experiments using synthesis and scan data to evaluate our method and demonstrate its superiority over some baseline methods and an optimization-based method. Results show that our upsampled points have better uniformity and are located closer to the underlying surfaces. Unsupervised feature learning for point clouds has been vital for large-scale point cloud understanding. Recent deep learning based methods depend on learning global geometry from self-reconstruction. However, these methods are still suffering from ineffective learning of local geometry, which significantly limits the discriminability of learned features. To resolve this issue, we propose MAP-VAE to enable the learning of global and local geometry by jointly leveraging global and local self-supervision. To enable effective local self-supervision, we introduce multi-angle analysis for point clouds. In a multi-angle scenario, we first split a point cloud into a front half and a back half from each angle, and then, train MAP-VAE to learn to predict a back half sequence from the corresponding front half sequence. MAP-VAE performs this half-to-half prediction using RNN to simultaneously learn each local geometry and the spatial relationship among them. In addition, MAP-VAE also learns global geometry via self-reconstruction, where we employ a variational constraint to facilitate novel shape generation. The outperforming results in four shape analysis tasks show that MAP-VAE can learn more discriminative global or local features than the state-of-the-art methods. Learning and analyzing 3D point cloud with deep networks is challenging due to the sparseness and irregularity of the data. In this paper, we present a data-driven point cloud upsampling technique. The key idea is to learn multi-level features per point, and then expanding them via a multi-branch convolution unit, to implicitly expand the point set in feature space. The expanded feature is then split to a multitude of features, which are then reconstructed to an upsampled point set. Our network is applied at a patch-level, with a joint loss function that encourages the upsampled points to remain on the underlying surface with a uniform distribution. We conduct various experiments using synthesis and scan data to evaluate our method and demonstrate its superiority over some baseline methods and an optimization-based method. The results show that our upsampled results have better uniformity, and sampled closer to the underlying surface. Feature learning on point clouds has shown great promise, with the introduction of effective and generalizable deep learning frameworks such as pointnet++. Thus far, however, point features have been abstracted in an independent and isolated manner, ignoring the relative layout of neighboring points as well as their features. In the present article, we propose to overcome this limitation by using spectral graph convolution on a local graph, combined with a novel graph pooling strategy. In our approach, graph convolution is carried out on a nearest neighbor graph constructed from a point’s neighborhood, such that features are jointly learned. We replace the standard max pooling step with a recursive clustering and pooling strategy, devised to aggregate information from within clusters of nodes that are close to one another in their spectral coordinates, leading to richer overall feature descriptors. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets, we show a consistent demonstrable advantage for the tasks of both point set classification and segmentation. Our implementations are available at https: github.com fate3439 LocalSpecGCN.