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arXiv · 2409.10824

Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of LiDAR Odometry and Localization Under Real-World Corruptions

Bo Yang·Tri Minh Triet Pham·Jinqiu Yang
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Abstract

LiDAR odometry and localization are two widely used and fundamental applications in robotic and autonomous driving systems. Although state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems achieve high accuracy on clean point clouds, their robustness to corrupted data remains largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the robustness of LiDAR pose-estimation techniques under 18 realistic synthetic corruptions. Our results show that, under these corruptions, odometry position errors escalate from 0.5% to more than 80%, while localization performance stays consistently high. To address this sensitivity, we propose two complementary strategies. First, we design a lightweight detection-and-filter pipeline that classifies the point cloud corruption and applies a corresponding filter (e.g., bilateral filter for noise) to restore the point cloud quality. Our classifier accurately identifies each corruption type, and the filter effectively restores odometry accuracy to near-clean data levels. Second, for learning-based systems, we show that fine-tuning using the corrupted data substantially improves robustness across all tested corruptions and even boosts performance on clean point clouds on one data sequence.

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Bo Yang, Tri Minh Triet Pham, Jinqiu Yang. 2024-09-17. Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of LiDAR Odometry and Localization Under Real-World Corruptions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10824

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