Temporal-Aware Fusion for Robust Outdoor LiDAR Localization

Abstract

LiDAR relocalization aims to estimate the global 6-DoF pose of a sensor in the environment. However, existing regression-based approaches often encounter limitations in dynamic or ambiguous scenarios, as they typically prioritize single-frame inference, leaving the potential of spatio-temporal consistency across scans not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a Temporal-aware Localization framework (TempLoc) designed to enhance the robustness of outdoor localization by effectively modeling sequential consistency. Specifically, a Global Coordinate Estimation module is first introduced to predict point-wise global coordinates and associated uncertainties for each LiDAR scan. A Prior Coordinate Generation module is then presented to estimate inter-frame point correspondences by the attention mechanism. Lastly, an Uncertainty-Guided Coordinate Fusion module is deployed to integrate both predictions of point correspondence in an end-to-end fashion, yielding a more temporally consistent and accurate global 6-DoF pose. Experimental results on the NCLT and Oxford RobotCar benchmarks show that our TempLoc outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of temporal-aware correspondence modeling in LiDAR relocalization.