Learning to close the loop from 3D point clouds

This paper presents a new solution to the loop closing problem for 3D point clouds. Loop closing is the problem of detecting the return to a previously visited location, and constitutes an important part of the solution to the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) problem. It is important to achieve a low level of false alarms, since closing a false loop can have disastrous effects in a SLAM algorithm. In this work, the point clouds are described using features, which efficiently reduces the dimension of the data by a factor of 300 or more. The machine learning algorithm AdaBoost is used to learn a classifier from the features. All features are invariant to rotation, resulting in a classifier that is invariant to rotation. The presented method does neither rely on the discretisation of 3D space, nor on the extraction of lines, corners or planes. The classifier is extensively evaluated on publicly available outdoor and indoor data, and is shown to be able to robustly and accurately determine whether a pair of point clouds is from the same location or not. Experiments show detection rates of 63% for outdoor and 53% for indoor data at a false alarm rate of 0%. Furthermore, the classifier is shown to generalise well when trained on outdoor data and tested on indoor data in a SLAM experiment.