LMBAO: A Landmark Map for Bundle Adjustment Odometry in LiDAR SLAM

LiDAR odometry is one of the essential parts of LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, existing LiDAR odometry tends to match a new scan simply iteratively with previous fixed-pose scans, gradually accumulating errors. Furthermore, as an effective joint optimization mechanism, bundle adjustment (BA) cannot be directly introduced into real-time odometry due to the intensive computation of large-scale global landmarks. Therefore, this letter designs a new strategy named a landmark map for bundle adjustment odometry (LMBAO) in LiDAR SLAM to solve these problems. First, BA-based odometry is further developed with an active landmark maintenance strategy for a more accurate local registration and avoiding cumulative errors. Specifically, this paper keeps entire stable landmarks on the map instead of just their feature points in the sliding window and deletes the landmarks according to their active grade. Next, the sliding window length is reduced, and marginalization is performed to retain the scans outside the window but corresponding to active landmarks on the map, greatly simplifying the computation and improving the real-time properties. In addition, experiments on three challenging datasets show that our algorithm achieves real-time performance in outdoor driving and outperforms state-of-the-art LiDAR SLAM algorithms, including Lego-LOAM and VLOM.

ASPCNet: A Deep Adaptive Spatial Pattern Capsule Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Previous studies have shown the great potential of capsule networks for the spatial contextual feature extraction from {hyperspectral images (HSIs)}. However, the sampling locations of the convolutional kernels of capsules are fixed and cannot be adaptively changed according to the inconsistent semantic information of HSIs. Based on this observation, this paper proposes an adaptive spatial pattern capsule network (ASPCNet) architecture by developing an adaptive spatial pattern (ASP) unit, that can rotate the sampling location of convolutional kernels on the basis of an enlarged receptive field. Note that this unit can learn more discriminative representations of HSIs with fewer parameters. Specifically, two cascaded ASP-based convolution operations (ASPConvs) are applied to input images to learn relatively high-level semantic features, transmitting hierarchical structures among capsules more accurately than the use of the most fundamental features. Furthermore, the semantic features are fed into ASP-based conv-capsule operations (ASPCaps) to explore the shapes of objects among the capsules in an adaptive manner, further exploring the potential of capsule networks. Finally, the class labels of image patches centered on test samples can be determined according to the fully connected capsule layer. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that ASPCNet can yield competitive performance with higher accuracies than state-of-the-art methods.