MTD-Map: Single-Stage Long-Term LiDAR Map Maintenance Framework via Mixture Transition Distribution
This work addresses the need for a unified map maintenance solution in long-term autonomous navigation, offering a practical framework that combines two traditionally separate tasks.
MTD-Map proposes a single-stage LiDAR map maintenance framework that simultaneously handles dynamic object removal and change detection using Mixture Transition Distribution modeling, achieving robust performance and reduced computational costs.
While robust map maintenance has advanced significantly, existing studies have focused on specific tasks, especially dynamic object removal or change detection. In this paper, we take a holistic view of the map maintenance problem and propose MTD-Map, a single-stage framework that handles both dynamic object removal and change detection without separate task-specific modules. MTD-Map employs an explicit representation that compactly encodes the direction and duration of occupancy transitions through Mixture Transition Distribution (MTD) modeling. We develop a recursive MTD formulation that encodes historical occupancy patterns into an augmented state to capture high-order temporal dependencies. Furthermore, a stability-driven adaptive strategy balances noise suppression with the preservation of quasi-static structures. Extensive experiments verify that MTD-Map robustly removes dynamic objects and achieves competitive change detection performance, subsequently reducing computational costs. Our project page is available at: https://taeyoung96.github.io/mtd_map/.