CVTNet: A Cross-View Transformer Network for LiDAR-Based Place Recognition in Autonomous Driving Environments

Junyi Ma, Guangming Xiong, Jingyi Xu, Xieyuanli Chen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is one of the most crucial components of autonomous vehicles to identify previously visited places in GPS-denied environments. Most existing LPR methods use mundane representations of the input point cloud without considering different views, which may not fully exploit the information from LiDAR sensors. In this article, we propose a cross-view transformer-based network, dubbed CVTNet, to fuse the range image views and bird's eye views generated from the LiDAR data. It extracts correlations within the views using intratransformers and between the two different views using intertransformers. Based on that, our proposed CVTNet generates a yaw-angle-invariant global descriptor for each laser scan end-to-end online and retrieves previously seen places by descriptor matching between the current query scan and the prebuilt database. We evaluate our approach on three datasets collected with different sensor setups and environmental conditions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art LPR methods with strong robustness to viewpoint changes and long-time spans. Furthermore, our approach has better real-time performance that can run faster than the typical LiDAR frame rate does.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4039-4048
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2024

Keywords

  • Autonomous driving
  • LiDAR place recognition (LPR)
  • multiview fusion
  • transformer network

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