BEV-SLD: Self-Supervised Scene Landmark Detection for Global Localization with LiDAR Bird's-Eye View Images

We present BEV-SLD, a LiDAR global localization method building on the Scene Landmark Detection (SLD) concept. Unlike scene-agnostic pipelines, our self-supervised approach leverages bird's-eye-view (BEV) images to discover scene-specific patterns at a prescribed spatial density and treat them as landmarks. A consistency loss aligns learnable global landmark coordinates with per-frame heatmaps, yielding consistent landmark detections across the scene. Across campus, industrial, and forest environments, BEV-SLD delivers robust localization and achieves strong performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

3D Gaussian Splatting aided Localization for Large and Complex Indoor-Environments

The field of visual localization has been researched for several decades and has meanwhile found many practical applications. Despite the strong progress in this field, there are still challenging situations in which established methods fail. We present an approach to significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of established visual localization methods by adding rendered images. In detail, we first use a modern visual SLAM approach that provides a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based map to create reference data. We demonstrate that enriching reference data with images rendered from 3DGS at randomly sampled poses significantly improves the performance of both geometry-based visual localization and Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) methods. Through comprehensive evaluation in a large industrial environment, we analyze the performance impact of incorporating these additional rendered views.

SLAM for Indoor Mapping of Wide Area Construction Environments

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), i.e., the reconstruction of the environment represented by a (3D) map and the concurrent pose estimation, has made astonishing progress. Meanwhile, large scale applications aiming at the data collection in complex environments like factory halls or construction sites are becoming feasible. However, in contrast to small scale scenarios with building interiors separated to single rooms, shop floors or construction areas require measures at larger distances in potentially texture less areas under difficult illumination. Pose estimation is further aggravated since no GNSS measures are available as it is usual for such indoor applications. In our work, we realize data collection in a large factory hall by a robot system equipped with four stereo cameras as well as a 3D laser scanner. We apply our state-of-the-art LiDAR and visual SLAM approaches and discuss the respective pros and cons of the different sensor types for trajectory estimation and dense map generation in such an environment. Additionally, dense and accurate depth maps are generated by 3D Gaussian splatting, which we plan to use in the context of our project aiming on the automatic construction and site monitoring.