LPD-AE: Latent Space Representation of Large-Scale 3D Point Cloud

The effective latent space representation of point cloud provides a foremost and fundamental manner that can be used for challenging tasks, including point cloud based place recognition and reconstruction, especially in large-scale dynamic environments. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network, LPD-AE(Large-scale Place Description AutoEncoder Network), to obtain meaningful local and contextual features for the generation of latent space from 3D point cloud directly. The encoder network constructs the discriminative global descriptors to realize high accuracy and robust place recognition, which contributed by extracting the local neighbor geometric features and aggregating neighborhood relationships both in feature space and physical space. The decoder network performs hierarchical reconstruction on coarse key points and ultimately produce dense point clouds, which shows that it is capable of reconstructing a full point cloud frame from a single compact but high dimensional descriptor. Our proposed network demonstrates performance that is comparable to the state-of-the-art approaches. With the benefit of the LPD-AE, many computationally complex tasks that rely directly on point clouds can be effortlessly conducted on latent space with lower memory costs, such as relocalization, loop closure detection, and map compression reconstruction. Comprehensive validations on Oxford RobotCar dataset, KITTI dataset, and our freshly collected dataset, which contains multiple trials of repeated routes in different weather and at different times, manifest its potency for real robotic and self-driving implementation. The source code is available at https://github.com/Suoivy/LPD-AE.