# MinkLoc3D: Point Cloud Based Large-Scale Place Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04530/

## Key facts

- Cited by 115 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 115)

- [LoGG3D-Net: Locally Guided Global Descriptor Learning for 3D Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08336/) (2021)
- [Improving Point Cloud Based Place Recognition with Ranking-based Loss and Large Batch Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00972/) (2022)
- [MinkLoc++: Lidar and Monocular Image Fusion for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05327/) (2021)
- [BEVPlace: Learning LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Bird's Eye View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14325/) (2023)
- [SVT-Net: Super Light-Weight Sparse Voxel Transformer for Large Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00149/) (2021)
- [AdaFusion: Visual-LiDAR Fusion with Adaptive Weights for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11739/) (2021)
- [Text2Loc: 3D Point Cloud Localization from Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15977/) (2023)
- [TransLoc3D : Point Cloud based Large-scale Place Recognition using Adaptive Receptive Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11605/) (2021)
- [RING++: Roto-translation Invariant Gram for Global Localization on a Sparse Scan Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05984/) (2022)
- [UAVScenes: A Multi-Modal Dataset for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22412/) (2025)
- [EgoNN: Egocentric Neural Network for Point Cloud Based 6DoF Relocalization at the City Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12486/) (2021)
- [SSC: Semantic Scan Context for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00382/) (2021)
- [Advancements in Point Cloud Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12113/) (2023)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [InCloud: Incremental Learning for Point Cloud Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00807/) (2022)
- [CASSPR: Cross Attention Single Scan Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12542/) (2022)
- [Spectral Geometric Verification: Re-Ranking Point Cloud Retrieval for Metric Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04432/) (2022)
- [SeqOT: A Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Place Recognition Using Sequential LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07951/) (2022)
- [CVTNet: A Cross-View Transformer Network for Place Recognition Using LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01665/) (2023)
- [LCPR: A Multi-Scale Attention-Based LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03198/) (2023)
- [I2P-Rec: Recognizing Images on Large-scale Point Cloud Maps through Bird's Eye View Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01043/) (2023)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Loop Closing and Relocalization for Reliable LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08086/) (2023)
- [STUN: Self-Teaching Uncertainty Estimation for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01851/) (2022)
- [MinkLoc3D-SI: 3D LiDAR place recognition with sparse convolutions, spherical coordinates, and intensity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06539/) (2021)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards the Real-world Autonomy Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04497/) (2022)
- [HiTPR: Hierarchical Transformer for Place Recognition in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05481/) (2022)
- [AutoMerge: A Framework for Map Assembling and Smoothing in City-scale Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06965/) (2022)
- [CrossLoc3D: Aerial-Ground Cross-Source 3D Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17778/) (2023)
- [LightLoc: Learning Outdoor LiDAR Localization at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17814/) (2025)
- [CGiS-Net: Aggregating Colour, Geometry and Implicit Semantic Features for Indoor Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02070/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The paper presents a learning-based method for computing a discriminative 3D point cloud descriptor for place recognition purposes. Existing methods, such as PointNetVLAD, are based on unordered point cloud representation. They use PointNet as the first processing step to extract local features, which are later aggregated into a global descriptor. The PointNet architecture is not well suited to capture local geometric structures. Thus, state-of-the-art methods enhance vanilla PointNet architecture by adding different mechanism to capture local contextual information, such as graph convolutional networks or using hand-crafted features. We present an alternative approach, dubbed MinkLoc3D, to compute a discriminative 3D point cloud descriptor, based on a sparse voxelized point cloud representation and sparse 3D convolutions. The proposed method has a simple and efficient architecture. Evaluation on standard benchmarks proves that MinkLoc3D outperforms current state-of-the-art. Our code is publicly available on the project website: https://github.com/jac99/MinkLoc3D