# GreenPCO: An Unsupervised Lightweight Point Cloud Odometry Method

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04054 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04054/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [DeepVO: Towards End-to-End Visual Odometry with Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08429/) (2017)
- [VINet: Visual-Inertial Odometry as a Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08376/) (2017)
- [Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks via Feedforward Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02786/) (2018)
- [PointHop: An Explainable Machine Learning Method for Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12766/) (2019)
- [R-PointHop: A Green, Accurate, and Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08129/) (2021)
- [PointHop++: A Lightweight Learning Model on Point Sets for 3D Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03281/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration via Salient Points Analysis (SPA)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01293/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feedforward Feature (UFF) Learning for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01280/) (2020)
- [DeepPCO: End-to-End Point Cloud Odometry through Deep Parallel Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11088/) (2019)
- [LOL: Lidar-Only Odometry and Localization in 3D Point Cloud Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01595/) (2020)
- [Recalibrating the KITTI Dataset Camera Setup for Improved Odometry Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03462/) (2021)
- [LS-VO: Learning Dense Optical Subspace for Robust Visual Odometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06019/) (2017)
- [GSIP: Green Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Indoor Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11835/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [S3I-PointHop: SO(3)-Invariant PointHop for 3D Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11506/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Edge Intelligence with Highly Discriminant LNT Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14968/) (2023)
- [PointFlowHop: Green and Interpretable Scene Flow Estimation from Consecutive Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14193/) (2023)
- [A Tiny Machine Learning Model for Point Cloud Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10898/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual odometry aims to track the incremental motion of an object using the information captured by visual sensors. In this work, we study the point cloud odometry problem, where only the point cloud scans obtained by the LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) are used to estimate object's motion trajectory. A lightweight point cloud odometry solution is proposed and named the green point cloud odometry (GreenPCO) method. GreenPCO is an unsupervised learning method that predicts object motion by matching features of consecutive point cloud scans. It consists of three steps. First, a geometry-aware point sampling scheme is used to select discriminant points from the large point cloud. Second, the view is partitioned into four regions surrounding the object, and the PointHop++ method is used to extract point features. Third, point correspondences are established to estimate object motion between two consecutive scans. Experiments on the KITTI dataset are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GreenPCO method. It is observed that GreenPCO outperforms benchmarking deep learning methods in accuracy while it has a significantly smaller model size and less training time.