Wild-Places: A Large-Scale Dataset for Lidar Place Recognition in Unstructured Natural Environments

Many existing datasets for lidar place recognition are solely representative of structured urban environments, and have recently been saturated in performance by deep learning based approaches. Natural and unstructured environments present many additional challenges for the tasks of long-term localisation but these environments are not represented in currently available datasets. To address this we introduce Wild-Places, a challenging large-scale dataset for lidar place recognition in unstructured, natural environments. Wild-Places contains eight lidar sequences collected with a handheld sensor payload over the course of fourteen months, containing a total of 63K undistorted lidar submaps along with accurate 6DoF ground truth. This dataset contains multiple revisits both within and between sequences, allowing for both intra-sequence (i.e., loop closure detection) and intersequence (i.e., re-localisation) tasks. We also benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches to demonstrate the challenges that this dataset introduces, particularly the case of long-term place recognition due to natural environments changing over time. Our dataset and code is available at https://csiro-robotics.github.io/Wild-Places

Automated summary

Wild-Places is a challenging large-scale dataset specifically designed for lidar place recognition in unstructured, natural environments. It contains eight lidar sequences with a total of 63K submaps and provides accurate ground truth for both loop closure detection and re-localisation tasks.