MPTF-Net: Multi-view Pyramid Transformer Fusion Network for LiDAR-based Place Recognition

TL;DR

MPTF-Net introduces a multi-view pyramid Transformer fusion network utilizing NDT-based BEV encoding for improved LiDAR place recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results with real-time inference.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-view multi-scale pyramid Transformer that explicitly models local geometric structures using NDT-based BEV encoding for enhanced place recognition.

Findings

Achieves 96.31% Recall@1 on nuScenes Boston split.

Maintains real-time inference latency of 10.02 ms.

Outperforms existing methods on multiple datasets.

Abstract

LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is essential for global localization and loop-closure detection in large-scale SLAM systems. Existing methods typically construct global descriptors from Range Images or BEV representations for matching. BEV is widely adopted due to its explicit 2D spatial layout encoding and efficient retrieval. However, conventional BEV representations rely on simple statistical aggregation, which fails to capture fine-grained geometric structures, leading to performance degradation in complex or repetitive environments. To address this, we propose MPTF-Net, a novel multi-view multi-scale pyramid Transformer fusion network. Our core contribution is a multi-channel NDT-based BEV encoding that explicitly models local geometric complexity and intensity distributions via Normal Distribution Transform, providing a noise-resilient structural prior. To effectively integrate these features, we develop a customized pyramid Transformer module that captures cross-view interactive correlations between Range Image Views (RIV) and NDT-BEV at multiple spatial scales. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes, KITTI and NCLT datasets demonstrate that MPTF-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, specifically attaining a Recall@1 of 96.31\% on the nuScenes Boston split while maintaining an inference latency of only 10.02 ms, making it highly suitable for real-time autonomous unmanned systems.