We introduce a novel method for oriented place recognition with 3D LiDAR scans. A Convolutional Neural Network is trained to extract compact descriptors from single 3D LiDAR scans. These can be used both to retrieve near-by place candidates from a map, and to estimate the yaw discrepancy needed for bootstrapping local registration methods. We employ a triplet loss function for training and use a hard-negative mining strategy to further increase the performance of our descriptor extractor. In an evaluation on the NCLT and KITTI datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms related state-of-the-art approaches based on both data-driven and handcrafted data representation in challenging long-term outdoor conditions.
@article{arxiv.1903.07918,
title = {OREOS: Oriented Recognition of 3D Point Clouds in Outdoor Scenarios},
author = {Lukas Schaupp and Mathias Bürki and Renaud Dubé and Roland Siegwart and Cesar Cadena},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.07918},
year = {2020}
}