Papers for

robotics mapping teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Unsupervised LiDAR point cloud registration improved using training-time semantic guidance

Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration via Training-Time Semantic Guidance

Abstract: Unsupervised registration of large-scale LiDAR point clouds remains challenging due to the geometric ambiguity inherent in outdoor scenes, which degrades pseudo-label quality and leads to suboptimal convergence, particularly for sparse, low-resolution scans such as those from nuScenes. We reveal that registration models intrinsically encode semantic awareness that strongly correlates with registration accuracy, albeit without explicit semantic supervision. However, this native awareness is fragile: noisy supervision arising from geometric ambiguity in unsupervised settings rapidly erodes the learned semantic structure, causing performance collapse. To this end, we propose CAESAR, a teacher-student framework guided by an off-the-shelf 3D segmentation model exclusively during training. We observe that potential inlier matches are often buried just beneath a few spurious neighbors in the noisy feature space, motivating Dual-Cue Guided Re-Matching to recover them through reselection rather than simply rejecting. Building on this, a train-only Semantic-Geometric Label Mining performs lightweight, batch-specific teacher refinement and mines reliable pseudo-labels under semantic guidance. We further introduce Semantic Predictive Distillation to consolidate the student's semantic awareness in the feature space. Extensive experiments on KITTI and nuScenes demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with pronounced gains on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. Crucially, CAESAR incurs zero inference overhead and requires no semantic annotations on the registration data. Code will be released.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Aligning 3D point clouds from outdoor laser scans is hard because different objects can look similar, causing errors when the system learns on its own. The authors found that these alignment models naturally learn some sense of object types, but this knowledge is fragile and can be ruined by mistakes in training. They introduced a method named CAESAR that uses an existing 3D segmentation model only during training to guide the alignment process and correct mistakes. This approach improves accuracy without needing extra annotations for the data or slowing down the final system.
Open 2609.15228v1