Doppler Correspondence: Non-Iterative Scan Matching With Doppler Velocity-Based Correspondence

Abstract

Achieving successful scan matching is essential for LiDAR odometry. However, in challenging environments with adverse weather conditions or repetitive geometric patterns, LiDAR odometry performance is degraded due to incorrect scan matching. Recently, the emergence of frequency-modulated continuous wave 4D LiDAR and 4D radar technologies has provided the potential to address these unfavorable conditions. The term 4D refers to point cloud data characterized by range, azimuth, and elevation along with Doppler velocity. Although 4D data is available, most scan matching methods for 4D LiDAR and 4D radar still establish correspondence by repeatedly identifying the closest points between consecutive scans, overlooking the Doppler information. This paper introduces, for the first time, a simple Doppler velocity-based correspondence -- Doppler Correspondence -- that is invariant to translation and small rotation of the sensor, with its geometric and kinematic foundations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method enables the direct matching of consecutive point clouds without an iterative process, making it computationally efficient. Additionally, it provides a more robust correspondence estimation in environments with repetitive geometric patterns.The implementation of our proposed method is publicly available at https://github.com/Tars0523/Doppler Correspondence.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: The red circle denotes source points, the blue circle represents target points, and the green arrow indicates the Doppler velocity of each point. While the ICP method requires multiple iterations to refine correspondences, the proposed method utilizes the direct scan matching approach based on Doppler Correspondence.
• Figure 2: The result of the proposed non-iterative scan matching method using the nyl trajectory in the NTU4DRadLM dataset zhang2023ntu4dradlm.
• Figure 3: Two corresponding points across consecutive scans. The radial and tangential velocity components form the basis of our Doppler Correspondence derivation.
• Figure 4: (a) illustrates multiple candidates due to symmetry in range and Doppler velocity, and (b) shows that the distance-based outlier rejection method filters out mismatched pairs.
• Figure 5: Trajectory results on multiple sequences. Each plot’s horizontal axis (x-axis) and vertical axis (y-axis) are in meters.