TransLoc3D : Point Cloud based Large-scale Place Recognition using Adaptive Receptive Fields
This work addresses place recognition for autonomous driving and robot navigation, offering a novel method that improves performance over existing solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting discriminative global descriptors for point cloud-based place recognition by addressing object size differences, moving objects, and long-range context, resulting in TransLoc3D, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant improvements on popular datasets.
Place recognition plays an essential role in the field of autonomous driving and robot navigation. Point cloud based methods mainly focus on extracting global descriptors from local features of point clouds. Despite having achieved promising results, existing solutions neglect the following aspects, which may cause performance degradation: (1) huge size difference between objects in outdoor scenes; (2) moving objects that are unrelated to place recognition; (3) long-range contextual information. We illustrate that the above aspects bring challenges to extracting discriminative global descriptors. To mitigate these problems, we propose a novel method named TransLoc3D, utilizing adaptive receptive fields with a point-wise reweighting scheme to handle objects of different sizes while suppressing noises, and an external transformer to capture long-range feature dependencies. As opposed to existing architectures which adopt fixed and limited receptive fields, our method benefits from size-adaptive receptive fields as well as global contextual information, and outperforms current state-of-the-arts with significant improvements on popular datasets.