PointLoc: Deep Pose Regressor for LiDAR Point Cloud Localization

In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end learning-based LiDAR sensor relocalization framework, termed PointLoc, which infers 6-DoF poses directly using only a single point cloud as input. Compared to visual sensor-based relocalization, LiDAR sensors can provide rich and robust geometric information about a scene. However, point clouds of LiDAR sensors are unordered and unstructured making it difficult to apply traditional deep learning regression models for this task. We address this issue by proposing a novel PointNet-style architecture with self-attention to efficiently estimate 6-DoF poses from 360° LiDAR sensor frames. Extensive experiments on recently released challenging Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset and real-world robot experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve accurate relocalization performance.