Efficient Implicit Neural Reconstruction Using LiDAR
Dongyu Yan, Xiaoyang Lyu, Jieqi Shi, Yi Lin
Abstract
Modeling scene geometry using implicit neural representation has revealed its advantages in accuracy, flex- ibility, and low memory usage. Previous approaches have demonstrated impressive results using color or depth images but still have difficulty handling poor light conditions and large- scale scenes. Methods taking global point cloud as input require accurate registration and ground truth coordinate labels, which limits their application scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses sparse LiDAR point clouds and rough odometry to reconstruct fine-grained implicit occupancy field efficiently within a few minutes. We introduce a new loss function that supervises directly in 3D space without 2D rendering, avoiding information loss. We also manage to refine poses of input frames in an end-to-end manner, creating consistent geometry without global point cloud registration. As far as we know, our method is the first to reconstruct implicit scene representation from LiDAR-only input. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including indoor and outdoor scenes, prove that our method is effective, efficient, and accurate, obtaining comparable results with existing methods using dense input.