The Mercator Descriptor: A Novel Global Descriptor for Loop Closure Detection

Welcome to the Mercator Descriptor repository! The Mercator Descriptor is a novel descriptor for loop closure detection and place recognition. This descriptor first uses a Mercator-like projection to generate a rotation-invariant descriptor from a frame of point clouds. Then, by constructing a database to store this new descriptor, it enables efficient matching between historical and current frames for loop closure detection.

Examples

video: Youtube link

** Example-1: place recognition with KITTI Odometry dataset**

** Example-2: loop closure correction on our dataset**

The figure depicts an overview of the Backpack laser scanning system and the campus dataset, as well as the resulting graphs with and without loop closure.

Developers:

Wang Zhibo(e-mail:[email protected])

Credits

We hereby recommend reading Scan Context ,FAST_LIO ,A-LOAM and STD for reference and thank them for making their work public.

License

The source code is released under GPLv3 license.

I am constantly working on improving this code. For any technical issues or commercial use, please contact me([email protected]).