Neural implicit representations are drawing a lot of attention from the robotics community recently, as they are expressive, continuous and compact. However, city-scale continual implicit dense mapping based on sparse LiDAR input is still an under-explored challenge. To this end, we successfully build a city-scale continual neural mapping system with a panoptic representation that consists of environment-level and instance-level modelling. Given a stream of sparse LiDAR point cloud, it maintains a dynamic generative model that maps 3D coordinates to signed distance field (SDF) values. To address the difficulty of representing geometric information at different levels in city-scale space, we propose a tailored three-layer sampling strategy to dynamically sample the global, local and near-surface domains. Meanwhile, to realize high fidelity mapping of instance under incomplete observation, category-specific prior is introduced to better model the geometric details. We evaluate on the public SemanticKITTI dataset and demonstrate the significance of the newly proposed three-layer sampling strategy and panoptic representation, using both quantitative and qualitative results. Codes and model will be publicly available.
@article{arxiv.2209.14072,
title = {City-scale Incremental Neural Mapping with Three-layer Sampling and Panoptic Representation},
author = {Yongliang Shi and Runyi Yang and Pengfei Li and Zirui Wu and Hao Zhao and Guyue Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.14072},
year = {2023}
}