LightLoc++ introduces a sensor‑robust framework for outdoor LiDAR localization that decouples a pretrained backbone from lightweight scene‑specific heads, enabling efficient new‑scene training. The authors present SULID, a synchronized urban multi‑LiDAR dataset featuring 32‑, 64‑, and 128‑beam sensors, which is used to pretrain a backbone via cross‑sensor consistency learning. Additional techniques such as sample classification guidance and redundant sample downsampling reduce regression ambiguity and computational load, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance with minimal new‑scene training cost.
By Wen Li, Shangshu Yu, Dunqiang Liu, Shaoyang Chen, Qiming Xia, Sheng Ao, Siqi Shen, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
DXPR is a depth‑based cross‑modal place recognition framework that matches monocular camera queries to a LiDAR map using a single vision foundation model backbone. By converting both modalities into a unified depth image representation, DXPR learns modality‑invariant global descriptors without modality‑specific encoders. A geometry‑aware overlap miner refines pairwise metric learning by computing pixel‑level overlap scores, and extensive tests on KITTI and Boreas show strong performance across seasons, weather, and day/night conditions, outperforming prior CMPR baselines.
Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) aims to identify the same location across heterogeneous sensing modalities, such as vision and LiDAR. Existing methods commonly bridge the modality gap using complex alignment modules, multi-stage training, or full fine-tuning of pretrained backbones.
arXiv:2606. 20189v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD).
By Maciej Wozniak, Jesper Ericsson, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Truls Nyberg, Thomas Gustafsson, Patric Jensfelt, Olov Andersson
arXiv:2606. 20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD).
By Maciej Wozniak, Jesper Ericsson, Hariprasath Govindarajan, Truls Nyberg, Thomas Gustafsson, Patric Jensfelt, Olov Andersson
arXiv:2606.27729v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: 6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning...
By Kaijie Yin, Zhiyuan Zhang, Tian Gao, Wentao Zhu, Cheng-zhong Xu, Hui Kong
arXiv:2607. 10762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-modal distillation from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to LiDAR backbones has recently emerged as a self-supervised pretraining strategy that reduces reliance on dense point-wise annotation for 3D scene understanding.
By Sutharsan Mahendran, Darshana Priyasad, Kaushik Roy, Tharindu Fernando, Sridha Sridharan, Clinton Fookes, Peyman Moghadam
Learning-based global point cloud registration has achieved remarkable progress, yet its reliance on geometric representations makes existing methods sensitive to variations in point density, scan pattern, viewpoint, and sensor characteristics. We propose CVSD-Reg, a robust global LiDAR registration framework that distills visual semantic priors from a vision foundation model into LiDAR representations.
The paper introduces TempLoc, a Temporal‑aware Localization framework that improves outdoor LiDAR relocalization by leveraging spatio‑temporal consistency across scans. It first predicts point‑wise global coordinates with uncertainties, then estimates inter‑frame correspondences using an attention‑based Prior Coordinate Generation module, and finally fuses these predictions in an uncertainty‑guided manner to produce a more accurate global 6‑DoF pose. Experiments on the NCLT and Oxford RobotCar datasets show that TempLoc significantly outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art methods.
By Minghang Zhu, Zhijing Wang, Yuxin Guo, Chen Liu, Yongshu Huang, Wen Li, Sheng Ao, Cheng Wang
arXiv:2608. 07579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The AI City Challenge 2026 Track 1 evaluates multi-camera 3D perception in large indoor warehouses under a synthetic-to-real (Sim2Real) setting; depth is available only for training and validation, so inference is RGB-only.
By Abdullah Naeem, Anav Katwal, Ayon Dey, Noman Khan, Md Tamjidul Hoque
arXiv:2606. 30576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) aims to locate a target object from a query view (e.
By Liyao Wang, Ruipu Wu, Haojun Xu, Lei Shi, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu
LiDAR-based Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) maps point clouds directly to 3D scene coordinates, enabling precise 6-DoF localisation without explicit map retrieval. However, existing methods produce deterministic predictions, discarding aleatoric uncertainty that could improve robustness and downstream decision-making.