LOL: Lidar-Only Odometry and Localization in 3D Point Cloud Maps
This work addresses localization challenges for Lidar-equipped vehicles in urban settings, representing an incremental improvement by combining existing methods with enhancements to reduce false matches.
The paper tackles the problem of correcting accumulated drift in Lidar-only odometry for vehicles in urban environments by integrating a state-of-the-art odometry algorithm with a 3D point segment matching method, resulting in significantly improved relocalization accuracy and trajectory precision across multiple Kitti datasets while maintaining real-time performance.
In this paper we deal with the problem of odometry and localization for Lidar-equipped vehicles driving in urban environments, where a premade target map exists to localize against. In our problem formulation, to correct the accumulated drift of the Lidar-only odometry we apply a place recognition method to detect geometrically similar locations between the online 3D point cloud and the a priori offline map. In the proposed system, we integrate a state-of-the-art Lidar-only odometry algorithm with a recently proposed 3D point segment matching method by complementing their advantages. Also, we propose additional enhancements in order to reduce the number of false matches between the online point cloud and the target map, and to refine the position estimation error whenever a good match is detected. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed LOL system on several Kitti datasets of different lengths and environments, where the relocalization accuracy and the precision of the vehicle's trajectory were significantly improved in every case, while still being able to maintain real-time performance.