# DeepPointMap: Advancing LiDAR SLAM with Unified Neural Descriptors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02684 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02684/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [On the Convergence of Adam and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09237/) (2019)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [SuMa++: Efficient LiDAR-based Semantic SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11320/) (2021)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [DeepGMR: Learning Latent Gaussian Mixture Models for Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09088/) (2020)
- [GeoTransformer: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration with Geometric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03768/) (2023)
- [LCDNet: Deep Loop Closure Detection and Point Cloud Registration for LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05056/) (2021)
- [SegMatch: Segment based loop-closure for 3D point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07720/) (2016)
- [SegMap: Segment-based mapping and localization using data-driven descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12837/) (2019)
- [IMLS-SLAM: scan-to-model matching based on 3D data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08633/) (2018)
- [CT-ICP: Real-time Elastic LiDAR Odometry with Loop Closure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12979/) (2021)
- [KITTI-CARLA: a KITTI-like dataset generated by CARLA Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00892/) (2021)
- [MULLS: Versatile LiDAR SLAM via Multi-metric Linear Least Square](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03771/) (2021)
- [PCAM: Product of Cross-Attention Matrices for Rigid Registration of Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01269/) (2021)
- [Laser2Vec: Similarity-based Retrieval for Robotic Perception Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15746/) (2020)

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

- [HybridDepth: Robust Metric Depth Fusion by Leveraging Depth from Focus and Single-Image Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18443/) (2024)
- [ADA-DPM: A Neural Descriptors-based Adaptive Noise Filtering Strategy for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18016/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point clouds have shown significant potential in various domains, including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, existing approaches either rely on dense point clouds to achieve high localization accuracy or use generalized descriptors to reduce map size. Unfortunately, these two aspects seem to conflict with each other. To address this limitation, we propose a unified architecture, DeepPointMap, achieving excellent preference on both aspects. We utilize neural network to extract highly representative and sparse neural descriptors from point clouds, enabling memory-efficient map representation and accurate multi-scale localization tasks (e.g., odometry and loop-closure). Moreover, we showcase the versatility of our framework by extending it to more challenging multi-agent collaborative SLAM. The promising results obtained in these scenarios further emphasize the effectiveness and potential of our approach.