Biography

I am pursuing my Ph.D degree in College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. My major research interests include 3D model learning and compression.

Research and Interests

• 3D Model Learning
• Compression

Publications

• Tianxin Huang, Qingyao Liu, Xiangrui Zhao, Jun Chen, and Yong Liu. Learnable Chamfer Distance for Point Cloud Reconstruction. Pattern Recognition Letters, 178:43-48, 2024.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  As point clouds are 3D signals with permutation invariance, most existing works train their reconstruction networks by measuring shape differences with the average point-to-point distance between point clouds matched with predefined rules. However, the static matching rules may deviate from actual shape differences. Although some works propose dynamically -updated learnable structures to replace matching rules, they need more iterations to converge well. In this work, we propose a simple but effective reconstruction loss, named Learnable Chamfer Distance (LCD) by dynamically paying attention to matching distances with different weight distributions controlled with a group of learnable networks. By training with adversarial strategy, LCD learns to search defects in reconstructed results and overcomes the weaknesses of static matching rules, while the performances at low iterations can also be guaranteed by the basic matching algorithm. Experiments on multiple reconstruction networks confirm that LCD can help achieve better reconstruction performances and extract more representative representations with faster convergence and comparable training efficiency.

  @article{huang2024lcd,
  title = {Learnable Chamfer Distance for Point Cloud Reconstruction},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Qingyao Liu and Xiangrui Zhao and Jun Chen and Yong Liu},
  year = 2024,
  journal = {Pattern Recognition Letters},
  volume = 178,
  pages = {43-48},
  doi = {10.1016/j.patrec.2023.12.015},
  abstract = {As point clouds are 3D signals with permutation invariance, most existing works train their reconstruction networks by measuring shape differences with the average point-to-point distance between point clouds matched with predefined rules. However, the static matching rules may deviate from actual shape differences. Although some works propose dynamically -updated learnable structures to replace matching rules, they need more iterations to converge well. In this work, we propose a simple but effective reconstruction loss, named Learnable Chamfer Distance (LCD) by dynamically paying attention to matching distances with different weight distributions controlled with a group of learnable networks. By training with adversarial strategy, LCD learns to search defects in reconstructed results and overcomes the weaknesses of static matching rules, while the performances at low iterations can also be guaranteed by the basic matching algorithm. Experiments on multiple reconstruction networks confirm that LCD can help achieve better reconstruction performances and extract more representative representations with faster convergence and comparable training efficiency.}
  }

• Jingyang Xiang, Siqi Li, Junhao Chen, Zhuangzhi Chen, Tianxin Huang, Linpeng Peng, and Yong Liu. MaxQ: Multi-Axis Query for N:m Sparsity Network. In 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 15845-15854, 2024.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  N:m sparsity has received increasing attention due to its remarkable performance and latency trade-off compared with structured and unstructured sparsity. How-ever, existing N:m sparsity methods do not differentiate the relative importance of weights among blocks and leave important weights underappreciated. Besides, they di-rectly apply N:m sparsity to the whole network, which will cause severe information loss. Thus, they are still sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective Multi-Axis Query methodology, dubbed as MaxQ, to rectify these problems. During the training, MaxQ employs a dynamic approach to generate soft N:m masks, considering the weight importance across multiple axes. This method enhances the weights with more importance and ensures more effective updates. Meanwhile, a spar-sity strategy that gradually increases the percentage of N:m weight blocks is applied, which allows the network to heal from the pruning-induced damage progressively. During the runtime, the N:m soft masks can be precom-puted as constants and folded into weights without causing any distortion to the sparse pattern and incurring ad-ditional computational overhead. Comprehensive experi-ments demonstrate that MaxQ achieves consistent improve-ments across diverse CNN architectures in various com-puter vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. For ResNet50 with 1:16 sparse pattern, MaxQ can achieve 74.6% top-1 ac-curacy on ImageNet and improve by over 2.8% over the state-of-the-art. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/JingyangXiang/MaxQ.

  @inproceedings{xiang2024maxq,
  title = {MaxQ: Multi-Axis Query for N:m Sparsity Network},
  author = {Jingyang Xiang and Siqi Li and Junhao Chen and Zhuangzhi Chen and Tianxin Huang and Linpeng Peng and Yong Liu},
  year = 2024,
  booktitle = {2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  pages = {15845-15854},
  doi = {10.1109/CVPR52733.2024.01500},
  abstract = {N:m sparsity has received increasing attention due to its remarkable performance and latency trade-off compared with structured and unstructured sparsity. How-ever, existing N:m sparsity methods do not differentiate the relative importance of weights among blocks and leave important weights underappreciated. Besides, they di-rectly apply N:m sparsity to the whole network, which will cause severe information loss. Thus, they are still sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective Multi-Axis Query methodology, dubbed as MaxQ, to rectify these problems. During the training, MaxQ employs a dynamic approach to generate soft N:m masks, considering the weight importance across multiple axes. This method enhances the weights with more importance and ensures more effective updates. Meanwhile, a spar-sity strategy that gradually increases the percentage of N:m weight blocks is applied, which allows the network to heal from the pruning-induced damage progressively. During the runtime, the N:m soft masks can be precom-puted as constants and folded into weights without causing any distortion to the sparse pattern and incurring ad-ditional computational overhead. Comprehensive experi-ments demonstrate that MaxQ achieves consistent improve-ments across diverse CNN architectures in various com-puter vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. For ResNet50 with 1:16 sparse pattern, MaxQ can achieve 74.6% top-1 ac-curacy on ImageNet and improve by over 2.8% over the state-of-the-art. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/JingyangXiang/MaxQ.}
  }

• Jun Chen, Haishan Ye, Mengmeng Wang, Tianxin Huang, Guang Dai, Ivor W. Tsang, and Yong Liu. Decentralized Riemannian Conjugate Gradient Method on the Stiefel Manifold. In 12nd International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract]

  The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold.

  @inproceedings{chen2024drc,
  title = {Decentralized Riemannian Conjugate Gradient Method on the Stiefel Manifold},
  author = {Jun Chen and Haishan Ye and Mengmeng Wang and Tianxin Huang and Guang Dai and Ivor W Tsang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2024,
  booktitle = {12nd International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  abstract = {The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold.}
  }

• Jun Chen, Shipeng Bai, Tianxin Huang, Mengmeng Wang, Guanzhong Tian, and Yong Liu. Data-Free Quantization via Mixed-Precision Compensation without Fine-Tuning. Pattern Recognition, 143:109780, 2023.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Neural network quantization is a very promising solution in the field of model compression, but its resulting accuracy highly depends on a training/fine-tuning process and requires the original data. This not only brings heavy computation and time costs but also is not conducive to privacy and sensitive information protection. Therefore, a few recent works are starting to focus on data-free quantization. However, data free quantization does not perform well while dealing with ultra-low precision quantization. Although researchers utilize generative methods of synthetic data to address this problem partially, data synthesis needs to take a lot of computation and time. In this paper, we propose a data-free mixed-precision compensation (DF-MPC) method to recover the performance of an ultra-low precision quantized model without any data and fine-tuning process. By assuming the quantized error caused by a low-precision quantized layer can be restored via the reconstruction of a high-precision quantized layer, we mathematically formulate the reconstruction loss between the pre-trained full-precision model and its layer-wise mixed-precision quantized model. Based on our formulation, we theoretically deduce the closed-form solution by minimizing the reconstruction loss of the feature maps. Since DF-MPC does not require any original/synthetic data, it is a more efficient method to approximate the full-precision model. Experimentally, our DF-MPC is able to achieve higher accuracy for an ultra-low precision quantized model compared to the recent methods without any data and fine-tuning process.

  @article{chen2023dfq,
  title = {Data-Free Quantization via Mixed-Precision Compensation without Fine-Tuning},
  author = {Jun Chen and Shipeng Bai and Tianxin Huang and Mengmeng Wang and Guanzhong Tian and Yong Liu},
  year = 2023,
  journal = {Pattern Recognition},
  volume = 143,
  pages = {109780},
  doi = {10.1016/j.patcog.2023.109780},
  abstract = {Neural network quantization is a very promising solution in the field of model compression, but its resulting accuracy highly depends on a training/fine-tuning process and requires the original data. This not only brings heavy computation and time costs but also is not conducive to privacy and sensitive information protection. Therefore, a few recent works are starting to focus on data-free quantization. However, data free quantization does not perform well while dealing with ultra-low precision quantization. Although researchers utilize generative methods of synthetic data to address this problem partially, data synthesis needs to take a lot of computation and time. In this paper, we propose a data-free mixed-precision compensation (DF-MPC) method to recover the performance of an ultra-low precision quantized model without any data and fine-tuning process. By assuming the quantized error caused by a low-precision quantized layer can be restored via the reconstruction of a high-precision quantized layer, we mathematically formulate the reconstruction loss between the pre-trained full-precision model and its layer-wise mixed-precision quantized model. Based on our formulation, we theoretically deduce the closed-form solution by minimizing the reconstruction loss of the feature maps. Since DF-MPC does not require any original/synthetic data, it is a more efficient method to approximate the full-precision model. Experimentally, our DF-MPC is able to achieve higher accuracy for an ultra-low precision quantized model compared to the recent methods without any data and fine-tuning process.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Hao Zou, Jinhao Cui, Jiangning Zhang, Xuemeng Yang, Lin Li, and Yong Liu. Adaptive Recurrent Forward Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 25:5903-5915, 2023.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Point cloud completion is an interesting and challenging task in 3D vision, which aims to recover complete shapes from sparse and incomplete point clouds. Existing completion networks often require a vast number of parameters and substantial computational costs to achieve a high performance level, which may limit their practical application. In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive efficient Recurrent Forward Network (ARFNet), which is composed of three parts: Recurrent Feature Extraction (RFE), Forward Dense Completion (FDC) and Raw Shape Protection (RSP). In an RFE, multiple short global features are extracted from incomplete point clouds, while a dense quantity of completed results are generated in a coarse-to-fine pipeline in the FDC. Finally, we propose the Adamerge module to preserve the details from the original models by merging the generated results with the original incomplete point clouds in the RSP. In addition, we introduce the Sampling Chamfer Distance to better capture the shapes of the models and the balanced expansion constraint to restrict the expansion distances from coarse to fine. According to the experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI, our network can achieve state-of-the-art completion performances on dense point clouds with fewer parameters, smaller model sizes, lower memory costs and a faster convergence.

  @article{huang2022arf,
  title = {Adaptive Recurrent Forward Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Hao Zou and Jinhao Cui and Jiangning Zhang and Xuemeng Yang and Lin Li and Yong Liu},
  year = 2023,
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Multimedia},
  volume = {25},
  pages = {5903-5915},
  doi = {10.1109/TMM.2022.3200851},
  abstract = {Point cloud completion is an interesting and challenging task in 3D vision, which aims to recover complete shapes from sparse and incomplete point clouds. Existing completion networks often require a vast number of parameters and substantial computational costs to achieve a high performance level, which may limit their practical application. In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive efficient Recurrent Forward Network (ARFNet), which is composed of three parts: Recurrent Feature Extraction (RFE), Forward Dense Completion (FDC) and Raw Shape Protection (RSP). In an RFE, multiple short global features are extracted from incomplete point clouds, while a dense quantity of completed results are generated in a coarse-to-fine pipeline in the FDC. Finally, we propose the Adamerge module to preserve the details from the original models by merging the generated results with the original incomplete point clouds in the RSP. In addition, we introduce the Sampling Chamfer Distance to better capture the shapes of the models and the balanced expansion constraint to restrict the expansion distances from coarse to fine. According to the experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI, our network can achieve state-of-the-art completion performances on dense point clouds with fewer parameters, smaller model sizes, lower memory costs and a faster convergence.}
  }

• Jianbiao Mei, Yu Yang, Mengmeng Wang, Tianxin Huang, Xuemeng Yang, and Yong Liu. SSC-RS: Elevate LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion with Representation Separation and BEV Fusion. In 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 7718-7725, 2023.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Semantic scene completion (SSC) jointly predicts the semantics and geometry of the entire 3D scene, which plays an essential role in 3D scene understanding for autonomous driving systems. SSC has achieved rapid progress with the help of semantic context in segmentation. However, how to effectively exploit the relationships between the semantic context in semantic segmentation and geometric structure in scene completion remains under exploration. In this paper, we propose to solve outdoor SSC from the perspective of representation separation and BEV fusion. Specifically, we present the network, named SSC-RS, which uses separate branches with deep supervision to explicitly disentangle the learning procedure of the semantic and geometric representations. And a BEV fusion network equipped with the proposed Adaptive Representation Fusion (ARF) module is presented to aggregate the multi-scale features effectively and efficiently. Due to the low computational burden and powerful representation ability, our model has good generality while running in real-time. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate our SSC-RS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Jieqianyu/SSC-RS.git.

  @inproceedings{mei2023ssc,
  title = {SSC-RS: Elevate LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion with Representation Separation and BEV Fusion},
  author = {Jianbiao Mei and Yu Yang and Mengmeng Wang and Tianxin Huang and Xuemeng Yang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2023,
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages = {7718-7725},
  doi = {10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10341742},
  abstract = {Semantic scene completion (SSC) jointly predicts the semantics and geometry of the entire 3D scene, which plays an essential role in 3D scene understanding for autonomous driving systems. SSC has achieved rapid progress with the help of semantic context in segmentation. However, how to effectively exploit the relationships between the semantic context in semantic segmentation and geometric structure in scene completion remains under exploration. In this paper, we propose to solve outdoor SSC from the perspective of representation separation and BEV fusion. Specifically, we present the network, named SSC-RS, which uses separate branches with deep supervision to explicitly disentangle the learning procedure of the semantic and geometric representations. And a BEV fusion network equipped with the proposed Adaptive Representation Fusion (ARF) module is presented to aggregate the multi-scale features effectively and efficiently. Due to the low computational burden and powerful representation ability, our model has good generality while running in real-time. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate our SSC-RS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Jieqianyu/SSC-RS.git.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Zhonggan Ding, Jiangning Zhang, Ying Tai, Zhenyu Zhang, Mingang Chen, Chengjie Wang, and Yong Liu. Learning to Measure the Point Cloud Reconstruction Loss in a Representation Space. In 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 12208-12217, 2023.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  For point cloud reconstruction-related tasks, the reconstruction losses to evaluate the shape differences between reconstructed results and the ground truths are typically used to train the task networks. Most existing works measure the training loss with point-to-point distance, which may introduce extra defects as predefined matching rules may deviate from the real shape differences. Although some learning-based works have been proposed to overcome the weaknesses of manually-defined rules, they still measure the shape differences in 3D Euclidean space, which may limit their ability to capture defects in reconstructed shapes. In this work, we propose a learning-based Contrastive Adver-sarial Loss (CALoss) to measure the point cloud reconstruction loss dynamically in a non-linear representation space by combining the contrastive constraint with the adversarial strategy. Specifically, we use the contrastive constraint to help CALoss learn a representation space with shape similarity, while we introduce the adversarial strategy to help CALoss mine differences between reconstructed results and ground truths. According to experiments on reconstruction-related tasks, CALoss can help task networks improve re-construction performances and learn more representative representations.

  @inproceedings{huang2023ltm,
  title = {Learning to Measure the Point Cloud Reconstruction Loss in a Representation Space},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Zhonggan Ding and Jiangning Zhang and Ying Tai and Zhenyu Zhang and Mingang Chen and Chengjie Wang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2023,
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  pages = {12208-12217},
  doi = {10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.01175},
  abstract = {For point cloud reconstruction-related tasks, the reconstruction losses to evaluate the shape differences between reconstructed results and the ground truths are typically used to train the task networks. Most existing works measure the training loss with point-to-point distance, which may introduce extra defects as predefined matching rules may deviate from the real shape differences. Although some learning-based works have been proposed to overcome the weaknesses of manually-defined rules, they still measure the shape differences in 3D Euclidean space, which may limit their ability to capture defects in reconstructed shapes. In this work, we propose a learning-based Contrastive Adver-sarial Loss (CALoss) to measure the point cloud reconstruction loss dynamically in a non-linear representation space by combining the contrastive constraint with the adversarial strategy. Specifically, we use the contrastive constraint to help CALoss learn a representation space with shape similarity, while we introduce the adversarial strategy to help CALoss mine differences between reconstructed results and ground truths. According to experiments on reconstruction-related tasks, CALoss can help task networks improve re-construction performances and learn more representative representations.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Jiangning Zhang, Jun Chen and Zhonggan Ding, Ying Tai, Zhenyu Zhang, Chengjie Wang, and Yong Liu. 3QNet: 3D Point Cloud Geometry Quantization Compression Network. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

  Since the development of 3D applications, the point cloud, as a spatial description easily acquired by sensors, has been widely used in multiple areas such as SLAM and 3D reconstruction. Point Cloud Compression (PCC) has also attracted more attention as a primary step before point cloud transferring and saving, where the geometry compression is an important component of PCC to compress the points geometrical structures. However, existing non-learning-based geometry compression methods are often limited by manually pre-defined compression rules. Though learning-based compression methods can significantly improve the algorithm performances by learning compression rules from data, they still have some defects. Voxel-based compression networks introduce precision errors due to the voxelized operations, while point-based methods may have relatively weak robustness and are mainly designed for sparse point clouds. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based point cloud compression framework named 3D Point Cloud Geometry Quantiation Compression Network (3QNet), which overcomes the robustness limitation of existing point-based methods and can handle dense points. By learning a codebook including common structural features from simple and sparse shapes, 3QNet can efficiently deal with multiple kinds of point clouds. According to experiments on object models, indoor scenes, and outdoor scans, 3QNet can achieve better compression performances than many representative methods.

  @article{huang2022Net,
  title = {3QNet: 3D Point Cloud Geometry Quantization Compression Network},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Jiangning Zhang and Jun Chen and Zhonggan Ding and Ying Tai and Zhenyu Zhang and Chengjie Wang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
  doi = {10.1145/3550454.3555481},
  abstract = {Since the development of 3D applications, the point cloud, as a spatial description easily acquired by sensors, has been widely used in multiple areas such as SLAM and 3D reconstruction. Point Cloud Compression (PCC) has also attracted more attention as a primary step before point cloud transferring and saving, where the geometry compression is an important component of PCC to compress the points geometrical structures. However, existing non-learning-based geometry compression methods are often limited by manually pre-defined compression rules. Though learning-based compression methods can significantly improve the algorithm performances by learning compression rules from data, they still have some defects. Voxel-based compression networks introduce precision errors due to the voxelized operations, while point-based methods may have relatively weak robustness and are mainly designed for sparse point clouds. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based point cloud compression framework named 3D Point Cloud Geometry Quantiation Compression Network (3QNet), which overcomes the robustness limitation of existing point-based methods and can handle dense points. By learning a codebook including common structural features from simple and sparse shapes, 3QNet can efficiently deal with multiple kinds of point clouds. According to experiments on object models, indoor scenes, and outdoor scans, 3QNet can achieve better compression performances than many representative methods.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Jun Chen, Jiangning Zhang, Yong Liu, and Jie Liang. Fast Point Cloud Sampling Network. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

  The increasing number of points in 3D point clouds has brought great challenges for subsequent algorithm efficiencies. Down-sampling algorithms are adopted to simplify the data and accelerate the computation. Except the well-known random sampling and farthest distance sampling, some recent works have tried to learn a sampling pattern according to the downstream task, which helps generate sampled points by fully-connected networks with fixed output point numbers. In this condition, a progress-net structure covering all resolutions sampling networks or multiple separate sampling networks for different resolutions are required, which is inconvenient. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based point cloud sampling framework, named Fast point cloud sampling network (FPN), which drives initial randomly sampled points to better positions instead of generating coordinates. FPN can be used to sample points clouds to any resolution once trained by changing the number of initial randomly sampled points. Results on point cloud reconstruction and recognition confirm that FPN can reach state-of-the-art performances with much higher sampling efficiency than most existing sampling methods.

  @article{huang2022fast,
  title = {Fast Point Cloud Sampling Network},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Jun Chen and Jiangning Zhang and Yong Liu and Jie Liang},
  year = 2022,
  journal = {Pattern Recognition Letters},
  doi = {10.1016/j.patrec.2022.11.006},
  abstract = {The increasing number of points in 3D point clouds has brought great challenges for subsequent algorithm efficiencies. Down-sampling algorithms are adopted to simplify the data and accelerate the computation. Except the well-known random sampling and farthest distance sampling, some recent works have tried to learn a sampling pattern according to the downstream task, which helps generate sampled points by fully-connected networks with fixed output point numbers. In this condition, a progress-net structure covering all resolutions sampling networks or multiple separate sampling networks for different resolutions are required, which is inconvenient. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based point cloud sampling framework, named Fast point cloud sampling network (FPN), which drives initial randomly sampled points to better positions instead of generating coordinates. FPN can be used to sample points clouds to any resolution once trained by changing the number of initial randomly sampled points. Results on point cloud reconstruction and recognition confirm that FPN can reach state-of-the-art performances with much higher sampling efficiency than most existing sampling methods.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Yong Liu, and Zaisheng Pan. Deep Residual Surrogate Model. Information Sciences, 605:86-98, 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Surrogate models are widely used to model the high computational cost problems such as industrial simulation or engineering optimization when the size of sampled data for modeling is greatly limited. They can significantly improve the efficiency of complex calculations by modeling original expensive problems with simpler computation-saving functions. However, a single surrogate model cannot always perform well for various problems. On this occasion, hybrid surrogate models are created to improve the final performances on different problems by combining advantages of multiple single models. Nevertheless, existing hybrid methods work by estimating weights for all alternative single models, which limits the efficiency when more single models are adopted. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid surrogate model quite different from former methods, named the Deep Residual Surrogate model (DRS). DRS does not merge all alternative single surrogate models directly by weights, but by assembling selected ones in a multiple layers structure. We propose first derivate validation (FDV) to recurrently select the single surrogate model adopted in each layer from all candidates. Experimental results on multiple benchmark problems demonstrate that DRS has better performances than existing single and hybrid surrogate models in both prediction accuracy and stability with higher efficiency. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  @article{huang2022drs,
  title = {Deep Residual Surrogate Model},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Yong Liu and Zaisheng Pan},
  year = 2022,
  journal = {Information Sciences},
  volume = {605},
  pages = {86-98},
  doi = {10.1016/j.ins.2022.04.041},
  abstract = {Surrogate models are widely used to model the high computational cost problems such as industrial simulation or engineering optimization when the size of sampled data for modeling is greatly limited. They can significantly improve the efficiency of complex calculations by modeling original expensive problems with simpler computation-saving functions. However, a single surrogate model cannot always perform well for various problems. On this occasion, hybrid surrogate models are created to improve the final performances on different problems by combining advantages of multiple single models. Nevertheless, existing hybrid methods work by estimating weights for all alternative single models, which limits the efficiency when more single models are adopted. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid surrogate model quite different from former methods, named the Deep Residual Surrogate model (DRS). DRS does not merge all alternative single surrogate models directly by weights, but by assembling selected ones in a multiple layers structure. We propose first derivate validation (FDV) to recurrently select the single surrogate model adopted in each layer from all candidates. Experimental results on multiple benchmark problems demonstrate that DRS has better performances than existing single and hybrid surrogate models in both prediction accuracy and stability with higher efficiency. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.}
  }

• Lin Li, Xin Kong, Xiangrui Zhao, Tianxin Huang, and Yong Liu. Semantic Scan Context: A Novel Semantic-based Loop-closure Method for LiDAR SLAM. Autonomous Robots, 46(4):535-551, 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  As one of the key technologies of SLAM, loop-closure detection can help eliminate the cumulative errors of the odometry. Many of the current LiDAR-based SLAM systems do not integrate a loop-closure detection module, so they will inevitably suffer from cumulative errors. This paper proposes a semantic-based place recognition method called Semantic Scan Context (SSC), which consists of the two-step global ICP and the semantic-based descriptor. Thanks to the use of high-level semantic features, our descriptor can effectively encode scene information. The proposed two-step global ICP can help eliminate the influence of rotation and translation on descriptor matching and provide a good initial value for geometric verification. Further, we built a complete loop-closure detection module based on SSC and combined it with the famous LOAM to form a full LiDAR SLAM system. Exhaustive experiments on the KITTI and KITTI-360 datasets show that our approach is competitive to the state-of-the-art methods, robust to the environment, and has good generalization ability. Our code is available at:https://github.com/lilin-hitcrt/SSC.

  @article{li2022ssc,
  title = {Semantic Scan Context: A Novel Semantic-based Loop-closure Method for LiDAR SLAM},
  author = {Lin Li and Xin Kong and Xiangrui Zhao and Tianxin Huang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  journal = {Autonomous Robots},
  volume = {46},
  number = {4},
  pages = {535-551},
  doi = {10.1007/s10514-022-10037-w},
  abstract = {As one of the key technologies of SLAM, loop-closure detection can help eliminate the cumulative errors of the odometry. Many of the current LiDAR-based SLAM systems do not integrate a loop-closure detection module, so they will inevitably suffer from cumulative errors. This paper proposes a semantic-based place recognition method called Semantic Scan Context (SSC), which consists of the two-step global ICP and the semantic-based descriptor. Thanks to the use of high-level semantic features, our descriptor can effectively encode scene information. The proposed two-step global ICP can help eliminate the influence of rotation and translation on descriptor matching and provide a good initial value for geometric verification. Further, we built a complete loop-closure detection module based on SSC and combined it with the famous LOAM to form a full LiDAR SLAM system. Exhaustive experiments on the KITTI and KITTI-360 datasets show that our approach is competitive to the state-of-the-art methods, robust to the environment, and has good generalization ability. Our code is available at:https://github.com/lilin-hitcrt/SSC.}
  }

• Lin Li, Xin Kong, Xiangrui Zhao, Tianxin Huang, Wanlong li, Feng Wen, Hongbo Zhang, and Yong Liu. RINet: Efficient 3D Lidar-Based Place Recognition Using Rotation Invariant Neural Network. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 7(2):4321-4328, 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is one of the basic capabilities of robots, which can retrieve scenes from maps and identify previously visited locations based on 3D point clouds. As robots often pass the same place from different views, LPR methods are supposed to be robust to rotation, which is lacking in most current learning-based approaches. In this letter, we propose a rotation invariant neural network structure that can detect reverse loop closures even training data is all in the same direction. Specifically, we design a novel rotation equivariant global descriptor, which combines semantic and geometric features to improve description ability. Then a rotation invariant siamese neural network is implemented to predict the similarity of descriptor pairs. Our network is lightweight and can operate more than 8000 FPS on an i7-9700 CPU. Exhaustive evaluations and robustness tests on the KITTI, KITTI-360, and NCLT datasets show that our approach can work stably in various scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

  @article{li2022rinet,
  title = {RINet: Efficient 3D Lidar-Based Place Recognition Using Rotation Invariant Neural Network},
  author = {Lin Li and Xin Kong and Xiangrui Zhao and Tianxin Huang and Wanlong li and Feng Wen and Hongbo Zhang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)},
  volume = {7},
  number = {2},
  pages = {4321-4328},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2022.3150499},
  abstract = {LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is one of the basic capabilities of robots, which can retrieve scenes from maps and identify previously visited locations based on 3D point clouds. As robots often pass the same place from different views, LPR methods are supposed to be robust to rotation, which is lacking in most current learning-based approaches. In this letter, we propose a rotation invariant neural network structure that can detect reverse loop closures even training data is all in the same direction. Specifically, we design a novel rotation equivariant global descriptor, which combines semantic and geometric features to improve description ability. Then a rotation invariant siamese neural network is implemented to predict the similarity of descriptor pairs. Our network is lightweight and can operate more than 8000 FPS on an i7-9700 CPU. Exhaustive evaluations and robustness tests on the KITTI, KITTI-360, and NCLT datasets show that our approach can work stably in various scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Xuemeng Yang, Jiangning Zhang, Jinhao Cui, Hao Zou, Jun Chen and Xiangrui Zhao, and Yong Liu. Learning to Train a Point Cloud Reconstruction Network Without Matching. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

  Reconstruction networks for well-ordered data such as 2D images and 1D continuous signals are easy to optimize through element-wised squared errors, while permutation-arbitrary point clouds cannot be constrained directly because their points permutations are not fixed. Though existing works design algorithms to match two point clouds and evaluate shape errors based on matched results, they are limited by pre-defined matching processes. In this work, we propose a novel framework named PCLossNet which learns to train a point cloud reconstruction network without any matching. By training through an adversarial process together with the reconstruction network, PCLossNet can better explore the differences between point clouds and create more precise reconstruction results. Experiments on multiple datasets prove the superiority of our method, where PCLossNet can help networks achieve much lower reconstruction errors and extract more representative features, with about 4 times faster training efficiency than the commonly-used EMD loss. Our codes can be found in https://github.com/Tianxinhuang/PCLossNet.

  @inproceedings{huang2022ltt,
  title = {Learning to Train a Point Cloud Reconstruction Network Without Matching},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Xuemeng Yang and Jiangning Zhang and Jinhao Cui and Hao Zou and Jun Chen and Xiangrui Zhao and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-19769-7_11},
  abstract = {Reconstruction networks for well-ordered data such as 2D images and 1D continuous signals are easy to optimize through element-wised squared errors, while permutation-arbitrary point clouds cannot be constrained directly because their points permutations are not fixed. Though existing works design algorithms to match two point clouds and evaluate shape errors based on matched results, they are limited by pre-defined matching processes. In this work, we propose a novel framework named PCLossNet which learns to train a point cloud reconstruction network without any matching. By training through an adversarial process together with the reconstruction network, PCLossNet can better explore the differences between point clouds and create more precise reconstruction results. Experiments on multiple datasets prove the superiority of our method, where PCLossNet can help networks achieve much lower reconstruction errors and extract more representative features, with about 4 times faster training efficiency than the commonly-used EMD loss. Our codes can be found in https://github.com/Tianxinhuang/PCLossNet.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Jiangning Zhang, Jun Chen and Yuang Liu, and Yong Liu. Resolution-free Point Cloud Sampling Network with Data Distillation. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

  Down-sampling algorithms are adopted to simplify the point clouds and save the computation cost on subsequent tasks. Existing learning-based sampling methods often need to train a big sampling network to support sampling under different resolutions, which must generate sampled points with the costly maximum resolution even if only low-resolution points need to be sampled. In this work, we propose a novel resolution-free point clouds sampling network to directly sample the original point cloud to different resolutions, which is conducted by optimizing non-learning-based initial sampled points to better positions. Besides, we introduce data distillation to assist the training process by considering the differences between task network outputs from original point clouds and sampled points. Experiments on point cloud reconstruction and recognition tasks demonstrate that our method can achieve SOTA performances with lower time and memory cost than existing learning-based sampling strategies. Codes are available at https://github.com/Tianxinhuang/PCDNet.

  @inproceedings{huang2022rfp,
  title = {Resolution-free Point Cloud Sampling Network with Data Distillation},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Jiangning Zhang and Jun Chen and Yuang Liu and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-20086-1_4},
  abstract = {Down-sampling algorithms are adopted to simplify the point clouds and save the computation cost on subsequent tasks. Existing learning-based sampling methods often need to train a big sampling network to support sampling under different resolutions, which must generate sampled points with the costly maximum resolution even if only low-resolution points need to be sampled. In this work, we propose a novel resolution-free point clouds sampling network to directly sample the original point cloud to different resolutions, which is conducted by optimizing non-learning-based initial sampled points to better positions. Besides, we introduce data distillation to assist the training process by considering the differences between task network outputs from original point clouds and sampled points. Experiments on point cloud reconstruction and recognition tasks demonstrate that our method can achieve SOTA performances with lower time and memory cost than existing learning-based sampling strategies. Codes are available at https://github.com/Tianxinhuang/PCDNet.}
  }

• Xiangrui Zhao, Sheng Yang, Tianxin Huang, Jun Chen and Teng Ma, Mingyang Li, and Yong Liu. SuperLine3D:Self-supervised 3D Line Segmentation and Description for LiDAR Point Cloud. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

  Poles and building edges are frequently observable objects on urban roads, conveying reliable hints for various computer vision tasks. To repetitively extract them as features and perform association between discrete LiDAR frames for registration, we propose the first learning-based feature segmentation and description model for 3D lines in LiDAR point cloud. To train our model without the time consuming and tedious data labeling process, we first generate synthetic primitives for the basic appearance of target lines, and build an iterative line auto-labeling process to gradually refine line labels on real LiDAR scans. Our segmentation model can extract lines under arbitrary scale perturbations, and we use shared EdgeConv encoder layers to train the two segmentation and descriptor heads jointly. Base on the model, we can build a highly-available global registration module for point cloud registration, in conditions without initial transformation hints. Experiments have demonstrated that our line-based registration method is highly competitive to state-of-the-art point-based approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxrzju/SuperLine3D.git.

  @inproceedings{zhao2022sls,
  title = {SuperLine3D:Self-supervised 3D Line Segmentation and Description for LiDAR Point Cloud},
  author = {Xiangrui Zhao and Sheng Yang and Tianxin Huang and Jun Chen and Teng Ma and Mingyang Li and Yong Liu},
  year = 2022,
  booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-20077-9_16},
  abstract = {Poles and building edges are frequently observable objects on urban roads, conveying reliable hints for various computer vision tasks. To repetitively extract them as features and perform association between discrete LiDAR frames for registration, we propose the first learning-based feature segmentation and description model for 3D lines in LiDAR point cloud. To train our model without the time consuming and tedious data labeling process, we first generate synthetic primitives for the basic appearance of target lines, and build an iterative line auto-labeling process to gradually refine line labels on real LiDAR scans. Our segmentation model can extract lines under arbitrary scale perturbations, and we use shared EdgeConv encoder layers to train the two segmentation and descriptor heads jointly. Base on the model, we can build a highly-available global registration module for point cloud registration, in conditions without initial transformation hints. Experiments have demonstrated that our line-based registration method is highly competitive to state-of-the-art point-based approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxrzju/SuperLine3D.git.}
  }

• Tianxin Huang, Hao Zou, Jinhao Cui, Xuemeng Yang, Mengmeng Wang, Xiangrui Zhao, Jiangning Zhang and Yi Yuan, Yifan Xu, and Yong Liu. RFNet: Recurrent Forward Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion. In 2021 International Conference on Computer Vision, pages 12488-12497, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Point cloud completion is an interesting and challenging task in 3D vision, aiming to recover complete shapes from sparse and incomplete point clouds. Existing learning based methods often require vast computation cost to achieve excellent performance, which limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Recurrent Forward Network (RFNet), which is composed of three modules: Recurrent Feature Extraction (RFE), Forward Dense Completion (FDC) and Raw Shape Protection (RSP). The RFE extracts multiple global features from the incomplete point clouds for different recurrent levels, and the FDC generates point clouds in a coarse-to-fine pipeline. The RSP introduces details from the original incomplete models to refine the completion results. Besides, we propose a Sampling Chamfer Distance to better capture the shapes of models and a new Balanced Expansion Constraint to restrict the expansion distances from coarse to fine. According to the experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI, our network can achieve the state-of-the-art with lower memory cost and faster convergence.

  @inproceedings{huang2021rfnetrf,
  title = {RFNet: Recurrent Forward Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion},
  author = {Tianxin Huang and Hao Zou and Jinhao Cui and Xuemeng Yang and Mengmeng Wang and Xiangrui Zhao and Jiangning Zhang and Yi Yuan and Yifan Xu and Yong Liu},
  year = 2021,
  booktitle = {2021 International Conference on Computer Vision},
  pages = {12488-12497},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.01228},
  abstract = {Point cloud completion is an interesting and challenging task in 3D vision, aiming to recover complete shapes from sparse and incomplete point clouds. Existing learning based methods often require vast computation cost to achieve excellent performance, which limits their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Recurrent Forward Network (RFNet), which is composed of three modules: Recurrent Feature Extraction (RFE), Forward Dense Completion (FDC) and Raw Shape Protection (RSP). The RFE extracts multiple global features from the incomplete point clouds for different recurrent levels, and the FDC generates point clouds in a coarse-to-fine pipeline. The RSP introduces details from the original incomplete models to refine the completion results. Besides, we propose a Sampling Chamfer Distance to better capture the shapes of models and a new Balanced Expansion Constraint to restrict the expansion distances from coarse to fine. According to the experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI, our network can achieve the state-of-the-art with lower memory cost and faster convergence.}
  }

• Hao Zou, Xuemeng Yang, Tianxin Huang, Chujuan Zhang, Yong Liu, Wanlong Li, Feng Wen, and Hongbo Zhang. Up-to-Down Network: Fusing Multi-Scale Context for 3D Semantic Scene Completion. In 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 16-23, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  An efficient 3D scene perception algorithm is a vital component for autonomous driving and robotics systems. In this paper, we focus on semantic scene completion, which is a task of jointly estimating the volumetric occupancy and semantic labels of objects. Since the real-world data is sparse and occluded, this is an extremely challenging task. We propose a novel framework, named Up-to-Down network (UDNet), to achieve the large-scale semantic scene completion with an encoder-decoder architecture for voxel grids. The novel up-to-down block can effectively aggregate multi-scale context information to improve labeling coherence, and the atrous spatial pyramid pooling module is leveraged to expand the receptive field while preserving detailed geometric information. Besides, the proposed multi-scale fusion mechanism efficiently aggregates global background information and improves the semantic completion accuracy. Moreover, to further satisfy the needs of different tasks, our UDNet can accomplish the multi-resolution semantic completion, achieving faster but coarser completion. Detailed experiments in the semantic scene completion benchmark of SemanticKITTI illustrate that our proposed framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods with remarkable margins and a real-time inference speed by using only voxel grids as input.

  @inproceedings{zou2021utd,
  title = {Up-to-Down Network: Fusing Multi-Scale Context for 3D Semantic Scene Completion},
  author = {Hao Zou and Xuemeng Yang and Tianxin Huang and Chujuan Zhang and Yong Liu and Wanlong Li and Feng Wen and Hongbo Zhang},
  year = 2021,
  booktitle = {2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  pages = {16-23},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9635888},
  abstract = {An efficient 3D scene perception algorithm is a vital component for autonomous driving and robotics systems. In this paper, we focus on semantic scene completion, which is a task of jointly estimating the volumetric occupancy and semantic labels of objects. Since the real-world data is sparse and occluded, this is an extremely challenging task. We propose a novel framework, named Up-to-Down network (UDNet), to achieve the large-scale semantic scene completion with an encoder-decoder architecture for voxel grids. The novel up-to-down block can effectively aggregate multi-scale context information to improve labeling coherence, and the atrous spatial pyramid pooling module is leveraged to expand the receptive field while preserving detailed geometric information. Besides, the proposed multi-scale fusion mechanism efficiently aggregates global background information and improves the semantic completion accuracy. Moreover, to further satisfy the needs of different tasks, our UDNet can accomplish the multi-resolution semantic completion, achieving faster but coarser completion. Detailed experiments in the semantic scene completion benchmark of SemanticKITTI illustrate that our proposed framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods with remarkable margins and a real-time inference speed by using only voxel grids as input.}
  }

• Xuemeng Yang, Hao Zou, Xin Kong, Tianxin Huang, Yong Liu, Wanlong Li, Feng Wen, and Hongbo Zhang. Semantic Segmentation-assisted Scene Completion for LiDAR Point Clouds. In 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 3555-3562, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Outdoor scene completion is a challenging issue in 3D scene understanding, which plays an important role in intelligent robotics and autonomous driving. Due to the sparsity of LiDAR acquisition, it is far more complex for 3D scene completion and semantic segmentation. Since semantic features can provide constraints and semantic priors for completion tasks, the relationship between them is worth exploring. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end semantic segmentation-assisted scene completion network, including a 2D completion branch and a 3D semantic segmentation branch. Specifically, the network takes a raw point cloud as input, and merges the features from the segmentation branch into the completion branch hierarchically to provide semantic information. By adopting BEV representation and 3D sparse convolution, we can benefit from the lower operand while maintaining effective expression. Besides, the decoder of the segmentation branch is used as an auxiliary, which can be discarded in the inference stage to save computational consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance on SemanticKITTI dataset with low latency. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/jokester-zzz/SSA-SC.

  @inproceedings{yang2021ssa,
  title = {Semantic Segmentation-assisted Scene Completion for LiDAR Point Clouds},
  author = {Xuemeng Yang and Hao Zou and Xin Kong and Tianxin Huang and Yong Liu and Wanlong Li and Feng Wen and Hongbo Zhang},
  year = 2021,
  booktitle = {2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  pages = {3555-3562},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636662},
  abstract = {Outdoor scene completion is a challenging issue in 3D scene understanding, which plays an important role in intelligent robotics and autonomous driving. Due to the sparsity of LiDAR acquisition, it is far more complex for 3D scene completion and semantic segmentation. Since semantic features can provide constraints and semantic priors for completion tasks, the relationship between them is worth exploring. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end semantic segmentation-assisted scene completion network, including a 2D completion branch and a 3D semantic segmentation branch. Specifically, the network takes a raw point cloud as input, and merges the features from the segmentation branch into the completion branch hierarchically to provide semantic information. By adopting BEV representation and 3D sparse convolution, we can benefit from the lower operand while maintaining effective expression. Besides, the decoder of the segmentation branch is used as an auxiliary, which can be discarded in the inference stage to save computational consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance on SemanticKITTI dataset with low latency. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/jokester-zzz/SSA-SC.}
  }

• Lin Li, Xin Kong, Xiangrui Zhao, Tianxin Huang, and Yong Liu. SSC: Semantic Scan Context for Large-Scale Place Recognition. In 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 2092-2099, 2021.
  [BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI] [PDF]

  Place recognition gives a SLAM system the ability to correct cumulative errors. Unlike images that contain rich texture features, point clouds are almost pure geometric information which makes place recognition based on point clouds challenging. Existing works usually encode low-level features such as coordinate, normal, reflection intensity, etc., as local or global descriptors to represent scenes. Besides, they often ignore the translation between point clouds when matching descriptors. Different from most existing methods, we explore the use of high-level features, namely semantics, to improve the descriptor’s representation ability. Also, when matching descriptors, we try to correct the translation between point clouds to improve accuracy. Concretely, we propose a novel global descriptor, Semantic Scan Context, which explores semantic information to represent scenes more effectively. We also present a two-step global semantic ICP to obtain the 3D pose (x, y, yaw) used to align the point cloud to improve matching performance. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lilin-hitcrt/SSC.

  @inproceedings{li2021ssc,
  title = {SSC: Semantic Scan Context for Large-Scale Place Recognition},
  author = {Lin Li and Xin Kong and Xiangrui Zhao and Tianxin Huang and Yong Liu},
  year = 2021,
  booktitle = {2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  pages = {2092-2099},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9635904},
  abstract = {Place recognition gives a SLAM system the ability to correct cumulative errors. Unlike images that contain rich texture features, point clouds are almost pure geometric information which makes place recognition based on point clouds challenging. Existing works usually encode low-level features such as coordinate, normal, reflection intensity, etc., as local or global descriptors to represent scenes. Besides, they often ignore the translation between point clouds when matching descriptors. Different from most existing methods, we explore the use of high-level features, namely semantics, to improve the descriptor’s representation ability. Also, when matching descriptors, we try to correct the translation between point clouds to improve accuracy. Concretely, we propose a novel global descriptor, Semantic Scan Context, which explores semantic information to represent scenes more effectively. We also present a two-step global semantic ICP to obtain the 3D pose (x, y, yaw) used to align the point cloud to improve matching performance. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lilin-hitcrt/SSC.}
  }