2023/04/27 by Chao Xia, Xia, Chao, Chenfeng Xu +13 · 4 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.14190
openalex publication_date 2023/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Current LiDAR odometry, mapping and localization methods leverage point-wise representations of 3D scenes and achieve high accuracy in autonomous driving tasks. However, the space-inefficiency of methods that use point-wise representations limits their development and usage in practical applications. In particular, scan-submap matching and global map representation methods are restricted by the inefficiency of nearest neighbor searching (NNS) for large-volume point clouds. To improve space-time efficiency, we propose a novel method of describing scenes using quadric surfaces, which are far more compact representations of 3D objects than conventional point clouds. In contrast to point cloud-based methods, our quadric representation-based method decomposes a 3D scene into a collection of sparse quadric patches, which improves storage efficiency and avoids the slow point-wise NNS process. Our method first segments a given point cloud into patches and fits each of them to a quadric implicit function. Each function is then coupled with other geometric descriptors of the patch, such as its center position and covariance matrix. Collectively, these patch representations fully describe a 3D scene, which can be used in place of the original point cloud and employed in LiDAR odometry, mapping and localization algorithms. We further design a novel incremental growing method for quadric representations, which eliminates the need to repeatedly re-fit quadric surfaces from the original point cloud. Extensive odometry, mapping and localization experiments on large-volume point clouds in the KITTI and UrbanLoco datasets demonstrate that our method maintains low latency and memory utility while achieving competitive, and even superior, accuracy.