Sequence matching enhanced 3D place recognition using candidate rearrangement

Abstract

Deep-learning-based 3D place recognition has received more attention since the data-driven fashion is widely used for the 3D point cloud applications. Most of the existing deep-learning-based 3D place recognition methods only utilise a single scene for place recognition. However, a single scene may have measurement noise or observable dynamic object differences, which may lead to a reduction in recognition accuracy. To improve the performance of 3D place recognition, a sequence matching based rearrangement method is proposed. Our sequence matching method is based on an assignment algorithm and guides the candidate rearrangement in searching for a similar place. The global descriptor extraction adapts the effective sparse tensor representation and a simple pooling layer to obtain the global descriptor. A new loss function combination is employed to train the network. The proposed approach is evaluated on the popular 3D place recognition benchmarks, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach.