aiqbench analysis
This paper presents TNVD-SC, a novel descriptor for LiDAR place recognition in forests that addresses structural aliasing caused by repetitive vegetation and uneven terrain. By encoding terrain-relative vertical probability distributions, the method significantly improves retrieval accuracy and stability compared to conventional Scan Context approaches while reducing computational latency.
TNVD-SC: Diagnosing Scan Context Failures in Forests with Terrain-Normalized Vertical Distributions
arXiv:2610.25637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term LiDAR place recognition in forests is difficult because repetitive vegetation and uneven terrain create severe structural aliasing. We diagnose Scan Context (SC) by separating candidate retrieval from fine matching: on the standardized TreeLoc++ Wild-Places protocol, a TNVD support key places a valid location in the top-25 set for approximately 99% of queries, while conventional SC matching on those candidates reaches only 61.84% mean R@1. With an identical raw-SC candidate set, terrain normalization improves max-height cells by only 1.21 points but vertical-distribution cells by 19.72 points. These observations motivate Terrain-Normalized Vertical Distribution Scan Context (TNVD-SC), which preserves the SC ring-sector topology while encoding terrain-relative vertical probability distributions. Under the standardized TreeLoc++ protocol, TNVD-SC reaches 91.83% mean R@1 and attains the highest R@1 mean and R@1 stability among the compared methods, while TreeLoc++ remains stronger in mean MR, MF1, and AUC. The unchanged method reaches 85.14% mean R@1 on the four-session CVTNet-style NCLT evaluation. A lossless count-coded implementation with exact hierarchical Jensen-Shannon search reduces descriptor payload by 3.86x and compute latency by 23.8% without changing the audited retrieval outputs.
Abstract:Long-term LiDAR place recognition in forests is difficult because repetitive vegetation and uneven terrain create severe structural aliasing. We diagnose Scan Context (SC) by separating candidate retrieval from fine matching: on the standardized TreeLoc++ Wild-Places protocol, a TNVD support key places a valid location in the top-25 set for approximately 99% of queries, while conventional SC matching on those candidates reaches only 61.84% mean R@1. With an identical raw-SC candidate set, terrain normalization improves max-height cells by only 1.21 points but vertical-distribution cells by 19.72 points. These observations motivate Terrain-Normalized Vertical Distribution Scan Context (TNVD-SC), which preserves the SC ring-sector topology while encoding terrain-relative vertical probability distributions. Under the standardized TreeLoc++ protocol, TNVD-SC reaches 91.83% mean R@1 and attains the highest R@1 mean and R@1 stability among the compared methods, while TreeLoc++ remains stronger in mean MR, MF1, and AUC. The unchanged method reaches 85.14% mean R@1 on the four-session CVTNet-style NCLT evaluation. A lossless count-coded implementation with exact hierarchical Jensen-Shannon search reduces descriptor payload by 3.86x and compute latency by 23.8% without changing the audited retrieval outputs.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2610.25637 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2610.25637v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.25637 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 275 words