{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/minkunext-point-cloud-based-large-scale-place","title":"MinkUNeXt: Point Cloud-based Large-scale Place Recognition using 3D Sparse Convolutions","arxiv_id":"2403.07593","date":"2024-03-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["J. J. Cabrera","A. Santo","A. Gil","C. Viegas","L. Payá"],"abstract":"This paper presents MinkUNeXt, an effective and efficient architecture for place-recognition from point clouds entirely based on the new 3D MinkNeXt Block, a residual block composed of 3D sparse convolutions that follows the philosophy established by recent Transformers but purely using simple 3D convolutions. Feature extraction is performed at different scales by a U-Net encoder-decoder network and the feature aggregation of those features into a single descriptor is carried out by a Generalized Mean Pooling (GeM). The proposed architecture demonstrates that it is possible to surpass the current state-of-the-art by only relying on conventional 3D sparse convolutions without making use of more complex and sophisticated proposals such as Transformers, Attention-Layers or Deformable Convolutions. A thorough assessment of the proposal has been carried out using the Oxford RobotCar and the In-house datasets. As a result, MinkUNeXt proves to outperform other methods in the state-of-the-art.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07593v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.07593v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"minkunext-point-cloud-based-large-scale-place","repo_url":"https://github.com/juanjo-cabrera/minkunext","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"philosophy","task_name":"Philosophy"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"concatenated-skip-connection","method_name":"Concatenated Skip Connection"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"generalized-mean-pooling","method_name":"Generalized Mean Pooling"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sparse-convolutions","method_name":"Sparse Convolutions"},{"method_slug":"u-net","method_name":"U-Net"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}