LiDAR-Based Place Recognition For Autonomous Driving: A Survey

LiDAR has gained popularity in autonomous driving due to advantages like long measurement distance, rich 3D information, and stability in harsh environments. Place Recognition (PR) enables vehicles to identify previously visited locations despite variations in appearance, weather, and viewpoints, even determining their global location within prior maps. This capability is crucial for accurate localization in autonomous driving. Consequently, LiDAR-based Place Recognition (LPR) has emerged as a research hotspot in robotics. However, existing reviews predominantly concentrate on Visual Place Recognition (VPR), leaving a gap in systematic reviews on LPR. This paper bridges this gap by providing a comprehensive review of LPR methods, thus facilitating and encouraging further research. We commence by exploring the relationship between PR and autonomous driving components. Then, we delve into the problem formulation of LPR, challenges, and relations to previous surveys. Subsequently, we conduct an in-depth review of related research, which offers detailed classifications, strengths and weaknesses, and architectures. Finally, we summarize existing datasets and evaluation metrics and envision promising future directions. This paper can serve as a valuable tutorial for newcomers entering the field of place recognition. We plan to maintain an up-to-date project on https://github.com/ShiPC-AI/LPR-Survey.