Deep Bayesian ICP Covariance Estimation

Abstract: Covariance estimation for the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) point cloud registration algorithm is essential for state estimation and sensor fusion purposes. We argue that a major source of error for ICP is in the input data itself, from the sensor noise to the scene geometry. Benefiting from recent developments in deep learning for point clouds, we propose a data-driven approach to learn an error model for ICP. We estimate covariances modeling data-dependent heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainty, and epistemic uncertainty using a variational Bayesian approach. The system evaluation is performed on LiDAR odometry on different datasets, highlighting good results in comparison to the state of the art.