Unsupervised Geometry-Aware Deep LiDAR Odometry

Learning-based ego-motion estimation approaches have recently drawn strong interest from researchers, mostly focusing on visual perception. A few learning-based approaches using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) have been re-ported; however, they heavily rely on a supervised learning manner. Despite the meaningful performance of these approaches, supervised training requires ground-truth pose labels, which is the bottleneck for real-world applications. Differing from these approaches, we focus on unsupervised learning for LiDAR odometry (LO) without trainable labels. Achieving trainable LO in an unsupervised manner, we introduce the uncertainty-aware loss with geometric confidence, thereby al-lowing the reliability of the proposed pipeline. Evaluation on the KITTI, Complex Urban, and Oxford RobotCar datasets demonstrate the prominent performance of the proposed method compared to conventional model-based methods. The proposed method shows a comparable result against SuMa (in KITTI), LeGO-LOAM (in Complex Urban), and Stereo-VO (in Oxford RobotCar). The video and extra-information of the paper are described in https://sites.google.com/view/deeplo.