LinK3D: Linear Keypoints Representation for 3D LiDAR Point Cloud

Feature extraction and matching are the basic parts of many robotic vision tasks, such as 2D or 3D object detection, recognition, and registration. As known, 2D feature extraction and matching have already been achieved great success. Unfortunately, in the field of 3D, the current methods fail to support the extensive application of 3D LiDAR sensors in robotic vision tasks, due to the poor descriptiveness and inefficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D feature representation method: Linear Keypoints representation for 3D LiDAR point cloud, called LinK3D. The novelty of LinK3D lies in that it fully considers the characteristics (such as the sparsity, and complexity of scenes) of LiDAR point clouds, and represents the keypoint with its robust neighbor keypoints, which provide strong distinction in the description of the keypoint. The proposed LinK3D has been evaluated on two public datasets (i.e., KITTI, Steven VLP16), and the experimental results show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art in matching performance. More importantly, LinK3D shows excellent real-time performance, faster than the sensor frame rate at 10 Hz of a typical rotating LiDAR sensor. LinK3D only takes an average of 32 milliseconds to extract features from the point cloud collected by a 64-beam LiDAR, and takes merely about 8 milliseconds to match two LiDAR scans when executed in a notebook with an Intel Core i7 @2.2 GHz processor. Moreover, our method can be widely extended to various 3D vision applications. In this paper, we apply the proposed LinK3D to the LiDAR odometry and place recognition task of LiDAR SLAM. The experimental results show that our method can improve the efficiency and accuracy of LiDAR SLAM system.