Deep lidar odometry

Abstract

Most existing lidar odometry estimation strategies are formulated under a standard framework that includes feature selection, and pose estimation through feature matching. In this work, we present a novel pipeline called LO-Net for lidar odometry estimation from 3D lidar scanning data using deep convolutional networks. The network is trained in an end-to-end manner, it infers 6-DoF poses from the encoded sequential lidar data. Based on the new designed mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, the network automatically learns effective feature representation for the lidar odometry estimation problem, and implicitly exploits the sequential dependencies and dynamics. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LO-Net has similar accuracy with the geometry-based approach.