STD: Stable Triangle Descriptor for 3D place recognition

In this work, we present a novel global descriptor termed stable triangle descriptor (STD) for 3D place recognition. For a triangle, its shape is uniquely determined by the length of the sides or included angles. Moreover, the shape of triangles is completely invariant to rigid transformations. Based on this property, we first design an algorithm to efficiently extract local key points from the 3D point cloud and encode these key points into triangular descriptors. Then, place recognition is achieved by matching the side lengths (and some other information) of the descriptors between point clouds. The point correspondence obtained from the descriptor matching pair can be further used in geometric verification, which greatly improves the accuracy of place recognition. In our experiments, we extensively compare our proposed system against other state-of-the-art systems (i.e., M2DP, Scan Context) on public datasets (i.e., KITTI, NCLT, and Complex-Urban) and our self-collected dataset (with a non-repetitive scanning solid-state LiDAR). All the quantitative results show that STD has stronger adaptability and a great improvement in precision over its counterparts. To share our findings and make contributions to the community, we open source our code on our GitHub: https://github.com/hku-mars/STD.

Efficient and Probabilistic Adaptive Voxel Mapping for Accurate Online 3D SLAM

This paper proposes an efficient and probabilistic adaptive voxel mapping method for 3D SLAM. An accurate uncertainty model of point and plane is proposed for probabilistic plane representation. We analyze the need for coarse-to-fine voxel mapping and then use a novel voxel map organized by a Hash table and octrees to build and update the map efficiently. We apply the voxel map to the iterated Kalman filter and construct the maximum posterior probability problem for pose estimation. The experiments on the open KITTI dataset show the high accuracy and efficiency of our method in contrast with other state-of-the-art. Outdoor experiments on unstructured environments with non-repetitive scanning LiDAR further verify the adaptability of our mapping method to different environments and LiDAR scanning patterns.

Fast and Accurate Extrinsic Calibration for Multiple LiDARs and Cameras

In this letter, we propose a fast, accurate, and targetless extrinsic calibration method for multiple LiDARs and cameras based on adaptive voxelization. On the theory level, we incorporate the LiDAR extrinsic calibration with the bundle adjustment method. We derive the second-order derivatives of the cost function w.r.t. the extrinsic parameter to accelerate the optimization. On the implementation level, we apply the adaptive voxelization to dynamically segment the LiDAR point cloud into voxels with non-identical sizes, and reduce the computation time in the process of feature correspondence matching. The robustness and accuracy of our proposed method have been verified with experiments in outdoor test scenes under multiple LiDAR-camera configurations.

Pixel-level Extrinsic Self Calibration of High Resolution LiDAR and Camera in Targetless Environments

In this letter, we present a novel method for automatic extrinsic calibration of high-resolution LiDARs and RGB cameras in targetless environments. Our approach does not require checkerboards but can achieve pixel-level accuracy by aligning natural edge features in the two sensors. On the theory level, we analyze the constraints imposed by edge features and the sensitivity of calibration accuracy with respect to edge distribution in the scene. On the implementation level, we carefully investigate the physical measuring principles of LiDARs and propose an efficient and accurate LiDAR edge extraction method based on point cloud voxel cutting and plane fitting. Due to the edges' richness in natural scenes, we have carried out experiments in many indoor and outdoor scenes. The results show that this method has high robustness, accuracy, and consistency. It can promote the research and application of the fusion between LiDAR and camera. We have open-sourced our code on GitHub to benefit the community.

CamVox: A Low-cost and Accurate Lidar-assisted Visual SLAM System

Combining lidar in camera-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an effective method in improving overall accuracy, especially at a large scale outdoor scenario. Recent development of low-cost lidars (e.g. Livox lidar) enable us to explore such SLAM systems with lower budget and higher performance. In this paper we propose CamVox by adapting Livox lidars into visual SLAM (ORB-SLAM2) by exploring the lidars' unique features. Based on the non-repeating nature of Livox lidars, we propose an automatic lidar-camera calibration method that will work in uncontrolled scenes. The long depth detection range also benefit a more efficient mapping. Comparison of CamVox with visual SLAM (VINS-mono) and lidar SLAM (LOAM) are evaluated on the same dataset to demonstrate the performance. We open sourced our hardware, code and dataset on GitHub.