Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (12): 2194-2205.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2025.20250252

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Loop closure detection method for LiDAR SLAM supported by stable static point cloud clusters

Jiaxin GAO1(), Xin SUI1,2, Changqiang WANG1, Aigong XU1(), Zhengxu SHI1   

  1. 1.School of Geomatics, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin 123000, China
    2.Ordos Institute, Liaoning Technical University, Ordos 017000, China
  • Received:2025-06-20 Revised:2025-11-04 Online:2026-01-15 Published:2026-01-15
  • Contact: Aigong XU E-mail:gao_jx9903@163.com;xu_ag@126.com
  • About author:GAO Jiaxin (1999—), male, PhD, majors in satellite positioning and navigation. E-mail: gao_jx9903@163.com
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42404045);The Liaoning Provincial Natural Science Foundation for the Doctoral Research Initiation Project(2024-BS-256);The Basic Research Projects of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education(LJ212410147093);The University-local Government Scientific and Technical Cooperation Cultivation Project of Ordos Institute-LNTU(YJY-XD-2024-B-007)

Abstract:

In dynamic, degenerate, and large-scale cluttered environments, loop closure detection methods based solely on point cloud processing exhibit poor robustness. Moreover, existing methods generally suffer from weak translation sensitivity and low computational efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a bag-of-words with stable static point cloud clusters-based loop closure detection method. Firstly, the degradation of the preprocessed point cloud is evaluated from the environmental structure perspective, and a robust point cloud cluster classification scheme is designed to obtain the stable static point cloud clusters to weaken the interference of dynamic targets. Subsequently, to reduce the redundancy in loop closure information, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation algorithm is used to adaptively filter the key frames. Finally, based on the stable static point cloud cluster and keyframe selection results, a bag-of-words with point cloud cluster local descriptors-based loop closure detection algorithm is proposed. The relative spatial relationship and attribute relationship between stable point cloud clusters are used to improve the translation and rotation sensitivity of bag information, so as to ensure the actual performance of loop closure detection in degenerate and cluttered scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can robustly detect the correct loop closure relationship in the measured scene, and the non-loop closure frame error detection rate is only 5.56%, with a single-keyframe processing time of 0.052 8 s. Compared with three similar methods BoW3D, ISC, and SGLC, the average improvement in the loop closure frame correct detection rate reaches 75.73%, the average reduction in the non-loop closure frame error detection rate is 81.93%, the processing has strong real-time performance, and it exhibits stronger robustness and applicability.

Key words: point cloud degradation evaluation, point cloud cluster classification, keyframe selection, bag-of-words model, loop closure detection

CLC Number: