TDACloud: Point Cloud Recognition Using Topological Data Analysis

Abstract: Point cloud-based object/place recognition remains a problem of interest in applications such as autonomous driving, scene reconstruction, and localization. Extracting meaningful local descriptors from a query point cloud that can be matched with the descriptors of the collected point clouds is a challenging problem. Furthermore, when the query point cloud is noisy or has been transformed (e.g., rotated), it adds to the complexity. To this end, we propose a novel methodology, named TDACloud, using Topological Data Analysis (TDA) for local descriptor extraction from a point cloud, which does not need resource-intensive GPU-based machine learning training. More specifically, we used the ATOL vectorization method to generate vectors for point clouds. Unlike voxelization, our proposed technique can take raw point clouds as inputs and outputs a fixed-size TDA-descriptor vector. To test the quality of the proposed TDACloud technique, we have implemented it on multiple real-world (e.g., Oxford RobotCar, KITTI-360) and realistic (e.g., ShapeNet) point cloud datasets for object and place recognition. We have also tested TDACloud on noisy and transformed test cases where the query point cloud has been scaled, translated, or rotated. Our results demonstrate high recognition accuracies in noisy conditions and large-scale real-world place recognition while outperforming the baselines by up to approximately 14%.