BoW3D: Bag of Words for Real-time Loop Closing in 3D LiDAR SLAM

Loop closing is a fundamental part of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous mobile systems. In the field of visual SLAM, bag of words (BoW) has achieved great success in loop closure. The BoW features for loop searching can also be used in the subsequent 6-DoF loop correction. However, for 3D LiDAR SLAM, the state-of-the-art methods may fail to effectively recognize the loop in real time, and usually cannot correct the full 6-DoF loop pose. To address this limitation, we present a novel Bag of Words for real-time loop closing in 3D LiDAR SLAM, called BoW3D. The novelty of our method lies in that it not only efficiently recognize the revisited loop places, but also correct the full 6-DoF loop pose in real time. BoW3D builds the bag of words based on the 3D feature LinK3D, which is efficient, pose-invariant and can be used for accurate point-to-point matching. We furthermore embed our proposed method into 3D LiDAR odometry system to evaluate loop closing performance. We test our method on public dataset, and compare it against other state-of-the-art algorithms. BoW3D shows better performance in terms of F1 max and extended precision scores in most scenarios with superior real-time performance. It is noticeable that BoW3D takes an average of 50 ms to recognize and correct the loops in KITTI 00 (includes 4K+ 64-ray LiDAR scans), when executed on a notebook with an Intel Core i7 @2.2 GHz processor.

LinK3D: Linear Keypoints Representation for 3D LiDAR Point Cloud

Feature extraction and matching are the basic parts of many computer vision tasks, such as 2D or 3D object detection, recognition, and registration. As we all know, 2D feature extraction and matching have already been achieved great success. Unfortunately, in the field of 3D, the current methods fail to support the extensive application of 3D LiDAR sensors in vision tasks, due to the poor descriptiveness and inefficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D feature representation method: Linear Keypoints representation for 3D LiDAR point cloud, called LinK3D. The novelty of LinK3D lies in that it fully considers the characteristics (such as sparsity, complexity of scenarios) of LiDAR point cloud, and represents current keypoint with its robust neighbor keypoints, which provide strong constraint on the description of current keypoint. The proposed LinK3D has been evaluated on two public datasets (i.e., KITTI, Steven VLP16), and the experimental results show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in matching performance. More importantly, LinK3D shows excellent real-time performance (based on the frequence 10 Hz of LiDAR). LinK3D only takes an average of 32 milliseconds to extract features from the point cloud collected by a 64-ray laser beam, and takes merely about 8 milliseconds to match two LiDAR scans when executed in a notebook with an Intel Core i7 @2.2 GHz processor. Moreover, our method can be widely extended to a variety of 3D vision applications. In this paper, we has applied our LinK3D to 3D registration, LiDAR odometry and place recognition tasks, and achieved competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art methods.