# RPR-Net: A Point Cloud-based Rotation-aware Large Scale Place Recognition Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10130/) (2018)
- [Learning SO(3) Equivariant Representations with Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06721/) (2017)
- [PointNetVLAD: Deep Point Cloud Based Retrieval for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03492/) (2018)
- [MinkLoc3D: Point Cloud Based Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04530/) (2020)
- [DensePoint: Learning Densely Contextual Representation for Efficient Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03669/) (2019)
- [Rotation Invariant Convolutions for 3D Point Clouds Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06297/) (2019)
- [On the Universality of Rotation Equivariant Point Cloud Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02449/) (2020)
- [PCAN: 3D Attention Map Learning Using Contextual Information for Point Cloud Based Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09793/) (2019)
- [SOE-Net: A Self-Attention and Orientation Encoding Network for Point Cloud based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12430/) (2020)
- [A Rotation-Invariant Framework for Deep Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07238/) (2020)
- [Rotation-Invariant Local-to-Global Representation Learning for 3D Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03318/) (2020)
- [SVT-Net: Super Light-Weight Sparse Voxel Transformer for Large Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00149/) (2021)
- [SRINet: Learning Strictly Rotation-Invariant Representations for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02163/) (2019)
- [Deep Positional and Relational Feature Learning for Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09080/) (2020)
- [Pointwise Rotation-Invariant Network with Adaptive Sampling and 3D Spherical Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09361/) (2018)
- [PRIN/SPRIN: On Extracting Point-wise Rotation Invariant Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12093/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [MinkUNeXt: Point Cloud-based Large-scale Place Recognition using 3D Sparse Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07593/) (2024)
- [VNI-Net: Vector Neurons-based Rotation-Invariant Descriptor for LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12870/) (2023)
- [LiteMVS: Efficient Multi-View Stereo with Foundation Distillation and Expert Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03851/) (2026)
- [WHU-PCPR: A cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset for place recognition in complex urban scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06442/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is an important but challenging task for many applications such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Taking the task as a point cloud retrieval problem, previous methods have made delightful achievements. However, how to deal with catastrophic collapse caused by rotation problems is still under-explored. In this paper, to tackle the issue, we propose a novel Point Cloud-based Rotation-aware Large Scale Place Recognition Network (RPR-Net). In particular, to solve the problem, we propose to learn rotation-invariant features in three steps. First, we design three kinds of novel Rotation-Invariant Features (RIFs), which are low-level features that can hold the rotation-invariant property. Second, using these RIFs, we design an attentive module to learn rotation-invariant kernels. Third, we apply these kernels to previous point cloud features to generate new features, which is the well-known SO(3) mapping process. By doing so, high-level scene-specific rotation-invariant features can be learned. We call the above process an Attentive Rotation-Invariant Convolution (ARIConv). To achieve the place recognition goal, we build RPR-Net, which takes ARIConv as a basic unit to construct a dense network architecture. Then, powerful global descriptors used for retrieval-based place recognition can be sufficiently extracted from RPR-Net. Experimental results on prevalent datasets show that our method achieves comparable results to existing state-of-the-art place recognition models and significantly outperforms other rotation-invariant baseline models when solving rotation problems.