InTEn-LOAM: Intensity and Temporal Enhanced LiDAR Odometry and Mapping

Traditional LiDAR odometry (LO) systems mainly leverage geometric information obtained from the traversed surroundings to register lazer scans and estimate LiDAR ego-motion, while they may be unreliable in dynamic or degraded environments. This paper proposes InTEn-LOAM, a low-drift and robust LiDAR odometry and mapping method that fully exploits implicit information of lazer sweeps (i.e., geometric, intensity and temporal characteristics). The specific content of this work includes method innovation and experimental verification. With respect to method innovation, we propose the cylindrical-image-based feature extraction scheme, which makes use of the characteristic of uniform spatial distribution of lazer points to boost the adaptive extraction of various types of features, i.e., ground, beam, facade and reflector. We propose a novel intensity-based point registration algorithm and incorporate it into the LiDAR odometry, enabling the LO system to jointly estimate the LiDAR ego-motion using both geometric and intensity feature points. To eliminate the interference of dynamic objects, we propose a temporal-based dynamic object removal approach to filter them out in the resulting points map. Moreover, the local map is organized and downsampled using a temporal-related voxel grid filter to maintain the similarity between the current scan and the static local map. With respect to experimental verification, extensive tests are conducted on both simulated and real-world datasets. The results show that the proposed method achieves similar or better accuracy with respect to the state-of-the-art in normal driving scenarios and outperforms geometric-based LO in unstructured environments.