Robotics: Science and Systems XIX

Self-Supervised Lidar Place Recognition in Overhead Imagery Using Unpaired Data

Tim Y. Tang, Daniele De Martini, Paul M Newman

Abstract:

As much as place recognition is crucial for navigation, mapping and collecting training ground truth, namely sensor data pairs across different locations, are costly and time-consuming. This paper tackles these by learning lidar place recognition on public overhead imagery and in a self-supervised fashion, with no need for paired lidar and overhead imagery data. We learn the cross-modal data comparison between lidar and overhead imagery with a multi-step framework. First, images are transformed into synthetic lidar data and a latent projection is learned. Next, we discover pseudo pairs of lidar and satellite data from unpaired and asynchronous sequences, and use them for training a final embedding space projection in a cross-modality place recognition framework. We train and test our approach on real data from various environments and show performances approaching a supervised method using paired data.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Tang-RSS-23, 
    AUTHOR    = {Tim Y. Tang AND Daniele De Martini AND Paul M Newman}, 
    TITLE     = {{Self-Supervised Lidar Place Recognition in Overhead Imagery Using Unpaired Data}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2023}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Daegu, Republic of Korea}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2023.XIX.098} 
}