PocoNet: SLAM-oriented 3D LiDAR Point Cloud Online Compression Network

In this paper, we present PocoNet: Point cloud Online COmpression NETwork to address the task of SLAM-oriented compression. The aim of this task is to select a compact subset of points with high priority to maintain localization accuracy. The key insight is that points with high priority have similar geometric features in SLAM scenarios. Hence, we tackle this task as point cloud segmentation to capture complex geometric information. We calculate observation counts by matching between maps and point clouds and divide them into different priority levels. Trained by labels annotated with such observation counts, the proposed network could evaluate the point-wise priority. Experiments are conducted by integrating our compression module into an existing SLAM system to evaluate compression ratios and localization performances. Experimental results on two different datasets verify the feasibility and generalization of our approach.