# KDD-LOAM: Jointly Learned Keypoint Detector and Descriptors Assisted LiDAR Odometry and Mapping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15394 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15394/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02669/) (2018)
- [D3Feat: Joint Learning of Dense Detection and Description of 3D Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03164/) (2020)
- [The Perfect Match: 3D Point Cloud Matching with Smoothed Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06879/) (2018)
- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [KISS-ICP: In Defense of Point-to-Point ICP -- Simple, Accurate, and Robust Registration If Done the Right Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15397/) (2022)
- [3DFeat-Net: Weakly Supervised Local 3D Features for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09413/) (2018)
- [SuMa++: Efficient LiDAR-based Semantic SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11320/) (2021)
- [GeoTransformer: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration with Geometric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03768/) (2023)
- [USIP: Unsupervised Stable Interest Point Detection from 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00229/) (2019)
- [You Only Hypothesize Once: Point Cloud Registration with Rotation-equivariant Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00182/) (2021)
- [Learning Compact Geometric Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05056/) (2017)
- [F-LOAM: Fast LiDAR Odometry And Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00822/) (2021)
- [CT-ICP: Real-time Elastic LiDAR Odometry with Loop Closure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12979/) (2021)

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

- [CMHANet: A Cross-Modal Hybrid Attention Network for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12721/) (2026)
- [IGASA: Integrated Geometry-Aware and Skip-Attention Modules for Enhanced Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12719/) (2026)
- [A Consistency-Aware Spot-Guided Transformer for Versatile and Hierarchical Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10295/) (2024)
- [Scalable and Generalizable Correspondence Pruning via Geometry-Consistent Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05773/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sparse keypoint matching based on distinct 3D feature representations can improve the efficiency and robustness of point cloud registration. Existing learning-based 3D descriptors and keypoint detectors are either independent or loosely coupled, so they cannot fully adapt to each other. In this work, we propose a tightly coupled keypoint detector and descriptor (TCKDD) based on a multi-task fully convolutional network with a probabilistic detection loss. In particular, this self-supervised detection loss fully adapts the keypoint detector to any jointly learned descriptors and benefits the self-supervised learning of descriptors. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that our TCKDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in point cloud registration. Furthermore, we design a keypoint detector and descriptors-assisted LiDAR odometry and mapping framework (KDD-LOAM), whose real-time odometry relies on keypoint descriptor matching-based RANSAC. The sparse keypoints are further used for efficient scan-to-map registration and mapping. Experiments on KITTI dataset demonstrate that KDD-LOAM significantly surpasses LOAM and shows competitive performance in odometry.