# Uncertainty-Aware Lidar Place Recognition in Novel Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01361 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01361/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [SalsaNext: Fast, Uncertainty-aware Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03653/) (2020)
- [PointNetVLAD: Deep Point Cloud Based Retrieval for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03492/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic Face Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09658/) (2019)
- [MinkLoc3D: Point Cloud Based Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04530/) (2020)
- [Dropout Sampling for Robust Object Detection in Open-Set Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06677/) (2017)
- [The Limits and Potentials of Deep Learning for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06557/) (2018)
- [Towards Safe Autonomous Driving: Capture Uncertainty in the Deep Neural Network For Lidar 3D Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05132/) (2018)
- [Scan Context++: Structural Place Recognition Robust to Rotation and Lateral Variations in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13494/) (2021)
- [OverlapTransformer: An Efficient and Rotation-Invariant Transformer Network for LiDAR-Based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03397/) (2022)
- [PCAN: 3D Attention Map Learning Using Contextual Information for Point Cloud Based Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09793/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Locus: LiDAR-based Place Recognition using Spatiotemporal Higher-Order Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14497/) (2020)
- [Learning an Uncertainty-Aware Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11375/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Triplet Loss: Uncertainty Quantification in Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12663/) (2020)
- [TransLoc3D : Point Cloud based Large-scale Place Recognition using Adaptive Receptive Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11605/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty for Identifying Open-Set Errors in Visual Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01328/) (2021)
- [InCloud: Incremental Learning for Point Cloud Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00807/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Heteroscedastic Aleatoric Uncertainties for Robust Real-Time LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05590/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [GeoAdapt: Self-Supervised Test-Time Adaptation in LiDAR Place Recognition Using Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04638/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art lidar place recognition models exhibit unreliable performance when tested on environments different from their training dataset, which limits their use in complex and evolving environments. To address this issue, we investigate the task of uncertainty-aware lidar place recognition, where each predicted place must have an associated uncertainty that can be used to identify and reject incorrect predictions. We introduce a novel evaluation protocol and present the first comprehensive benchmark for this task, testing across five uncertainty estimation techniques and three large-scale datasets. Our results show that an Ensembles approach is the highest performing technique, consistently improving the performance of lidar place recognition and uncertainty estimation in novel environments, though it incurs a computational cost. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/Uncertainty-LPR.