# LoGG3D-Net: Locally Guided Global Descriptor Learning for 3D Place Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08336 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08336/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [PointNetVLAD: Deep Point Cloud Based Retrieval for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03492/) (2018)
- [Beyond triplet loss: a deep quadruplet network for person re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01719/) (2017)
- [MinkLoc3D: Point Cloud Based Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04530/) (2020)
- [Is Second-order Information Helpful for Large-scale Visual Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08050/) (2017)
- [SegMap: Segment-based mapping and localization using data-driven descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12837/) (2019)
- [Locus: LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Spatiotemporal Higher-Order Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14497/) (2020)
- [Power Normalizations in Fine-grained Image, Few-shot Image and Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13975/) (2020)
- [Local Descriptor for Robust Place Recognition using LiDAR Intensity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12646/) (2018)
- [Elastic LiDAR Fusion: Dense Map-Centric Continuous-Time SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01691/) (2017)
- [Elasticity Meets Continuous-Time: Map-Centric Dense 3D LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02274/) (2020)
- [Learning to See the Wood for the Trees: Deep Laser Localization in Urban and Natural Environments on a CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10194/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Loop Closing and Relocalization for Reliable LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08086/) (2023)
- [Pair-VPR: Place-Aware Pre-training and Contrastive Pair Classification for Visual Place Recognition with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06614/) (2024)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards the Real-world Autonomy Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04497/) (2022)
- [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)
- [HOTFormerLoc: Hierarchical Octree Transformer for Versatile Lidar Place Recognition Across Ground and Aerial Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08140/) (2025)
- [SALSA: Swift Adaptive Lightweight Self-Attention for Enhanced LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08260/) (2024)
- [RecNet: An Invertible Point Cloud Encoding through Range Image Embeddings for Multi-Robot Map Sharing and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02192/) (2024)
- [ForestLPR: LiDAR Place Recognition in Forests Attentioning Multiple BEV Density Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04475/) (2025)
- [WildCross: A Cross-Modal Large Scale Benchmark for Place Recognition and Metric Depth Estimation in Natural Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01475/) (2026)
- [FRAME: A Modular Framework for Autonomous Map Merging: Advancements in the Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18006/) (2024)
- [Visual Localization in 3D Maps: Comparing Point Cloud, Mesh, and NeRF Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11966/) (2024)
- [TReR: A Lightweight Transformer Re-Ranking Approach for 3D LiDAR Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18013/) (2023)
- [FlashMix: Fast Map-Free LiDAR Localization via Feature Mixing and Contrastive-Constrained Accelerated Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00702/) (2024)
- [HOTFLoc++: End-to-End Hierarchical LiDAR Place Recognition, Re-Ranking, and 6-DoF Metric Localisation in Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09170/) (2025)
- [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)
- [SOLVR: Submap Oriented LiDAR-Visual Re-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10247/) (2024)
- [SPVSoAP3D: A Second-order Average Pooling Approach to enhance 3D Place Recognition in Horticultural Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17017/) (2024)
- [REGRACE: A Robust and Efficient Graph-based Re-localization Algorithm using Consistency Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03599/) (2025)
- [Vehicle-Scene Interaction: A Text-Driven 3D Lidar Place Recognition Method for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18035/) (2025)
- [Polar Perspectives: Evaluating 2-D LiDAR Projections for Robust Place Recognition with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02897/) (2025)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-based place recognition is an efficient and effective solution for re-localization within a pre-built map, or global data association for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The accuracy of such an approach is heavily dependent on the quality of the extracted scene-level representation. While end-to-end solutions - which learn a global descriptor from input point clouds - have demonstrated promising results, such approaches are limited in their ability to enforce desirable properties at the local feature level. In this paper, we introduce a local consistency loss to guide the network towards learning local features which are consistent across revisits, hence leading to more repeatable global descriptors resulting in an overall improvement in 3D place recognition performance. We formulate our approach in an end-to-end trainable architecture called LoGG3D-Net. Experiments on two large-scale public benchmarks (KITTI and MulRan) show that our method achieves mean F1max scores of 0.939 and 0.968 on KITTI and MulRan respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance while operating in near real-time. The open-source implementation is available at: https://github.com/csiro-robotics/LoGG3D-Net.