Pose-Graph Attentional Graph Neural Network for Lidar Place Recognition

This paper proposes a lidar place recognition approach, called P-GAT, to increase the receptive field between point clouds captured over time. Instead of comparing pairs of point clouds, we compare the similarity between sets of point clouds to use the maximum spatial and temporal information between neighbour clouds utilising the concept of pose-graph SLAM. Leveraging intra- and inter-attention and graph neural network, P-GAT relates point clouds captured in nearby locations in Euclidean space and their embeddings in feature space. Experimental results on the large-scale publically available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in recognising scenes lacking distinct features and when training and testing environments have different distributions (domain adaptation). Further, an exhaustive comparison with the state-of-the-art shows improvements in performance gains. Code will be available upon acceptance.