# Locus: LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Spatiotemporal Higher-Order Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.14497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [LoGG3D-Net: Locally Guided Global Descriptor Learning for 3D Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08336/) (2021)
- [AdaFusion: Visual-LiDAR Fusion with Adaptive Weights for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11739/) (2021)
- [RING++: Roto-translation Invariant Gram for Global Localization on a Sparse Scan Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05984/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Spectral Geometric Verification: Re-Ranking Point Cloud Retrieval for Metric Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04432/) (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)
- [BoxGraph: Semantic Place Recognition and Pose Estimation from 3D LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15154/) (2022)
- [Contour Context: Abstract Structural Distribution for 3D LiDAR Loop Detection and Metric Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06149/) (2023)
- [CCL: Continual Contrastive Learning for LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13952/) (2023)
- [GeoAdapt: Self-Supervised Test-Time Adaptation in LiDAR Place Recognition Using Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04638/) (2023)
- [SALSA: Swift Adaptive Lightweight Self-Attention for Enhanced LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08260/) (2024)
- [ForestLPR: LiDAR Place Recognition in Forests Attentioning Multiple BEV Density Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04475/) (2025)
- [Visual Localization in 3D Maps: Comparing Point Cloud, Mesh, and NeRF Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11966/) (2024)
- [A Unified BEV Model for Joint Learning of 3D Local Features and Overlap Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14511/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Lidar Place Recognition in Novel Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01361/) (2022)
- [Pose-Graph Attentional Graph Neural Network for Lidar Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00168/) (2023)
- [SPVSoAP3D: A Second-order Average Pooling Approach to enhance 3D Place Recognition in Horticultural Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17017/) (2024)
- [DSC: Deep Scan Context Descriptor for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13838/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Visual Map Localization Using LiDARs and Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03376/) (2022)
- [DeepRING: Learning Roto-translation Invariant Representation for LiDAR based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11029/) (2022)
- [BPT: Binary Point Cloud Transformer for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01166/) (2023)
- [A Coarse-to-Fine Place Recognition Approach using Attention-guided Descriptors and Overlap Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06881/) (2023)
- [VNI-Net: Vector Neurons-based Rotation-Invariant Descriptor for LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12870/) (2023)
- [Ranking-aware Continual Learning for LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07198/) (2025)
- [Advanced techniques and applications of LiDAR Place Recognition in Agricultural Environments: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22198/) (2026)
- [BEV-SLD: Self-Supervised Scene Landmark Detection for Global Localization with LiDAR Bird's-Eye View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17159/) (2026)
- [SeqNetVLAD vs PointNetVLAD: Image Sequence vs 3D Point Clouds for Day-Night Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11481/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Place Recognition enables the estimation of a globally consistent map and trajectory by providing non-local constraints in Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). This paper presents Locus, a novel place recognition method using 3D LiDAR point clouds in large-scale environments. We propose a method for extracting and encoding topological and temporal information related to components in a scene and demonstrate how the inclusion of this auxiliary information in place description leads to more robust and discriminative scene representations. Second-order pooling along with a non-linear transform is used to aggregate these multi-level features to generate a fixed-length global descriptor, which is invariant to the permutation of input features. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI dataset. Furthermore, Locus is demonstrated to be robust across several challenging situations such as occlusions and viewpoint changes in 3D LiDAR point clouds. The open-source implementation is available at: https://github.com/csiro-robotics/locus .