LATITUDE: Robotic Global Localization with Truncated Dynamic Low-Pass Filter in City-Scale NeRF

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have made great success in representing complex 3D scenes with high-resolution details and efficient memory. Nevertheless, current NeRF-based pose estimators have no initial pose prediction and are prone to local optima during optimization. In this paper, we present LATITUDE: Global Localization with Truncated Dynamic Low-pass Filter, which introduces a two-stage localization mechanism in city-scale NeRF. In place recognition stage, we train a regressor through images generated from trained NeRFs, which provides an initial value for global localization. In pose optimization stage, we minimize the residual between the observed image and rendered image by directly optimizing the pose on the tangent plane. To avoid falling into local optimum, we introduce a Truncated Dynamic Low-pass Filter (TDLF) for coarse-to-fine pose registration. We evaluate our method on both synthetic and real-world data and show its potential applications for high-precision navigation in large- scale city scenes. Codes and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/jike5/LATITUDE. *Equal contribution, †Corresponding author 1Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, China, {shiyongliang, lichuxuan, lipengfei, zhaohao, zhouguyue} @air.tsinghua.edu.cn. 2Beihang University, China, zhuzhenxin@buaa.edu.cn. 3Xi’an University of architecture and technology, China, yuan- tao@xauat.edu.cn. 4Beijing Institute of Technology, China, wuzirui@bit.edu.cn. 5The University of Hong Kong, China, houchao@connect.hku.hk.