Efficient and Distributed Large-Scale 3D Map Registration using Tomographic Features
This addresses the challenge of efficient and distributed map merging for robotics or autonomous systems, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational advancement.
The paper tackles the problem of large-scale 3D map registration by proposing an algorithm that uses tomographic features from 2D projections, resulting in an order of magnitude improvement in memory use and execution time compared to state-of-the-art methods.
A robust, resource-efficient, distributed, and minimally parameterized 3D map matching and merging algorithm is proposed. The suggested algorithm utilizes tomographic features from 2D projections of horizontal cross-sections of gravity-aligned local maps, and matches these projection slices at all possible height differences, enabling the estimation of four degrees of freedom in an efficient and parallelizable manner. The advocated algorithm improves state-of-the-art feature extraction and registration pipelines by an order of magnitude in memory use and execution time. Experimental studies are offered to investigate the efficiency of this 3D map merging scheme.