Scene coordinate regression (SCR) achieves strong performance in outdoor LiDAR localization, but it usually requires scene-specific training that can take days, limiting practical deployment. Recent works improve training efficiency by decoupling SCR into a scene-agnostic backbone and scene-specific prediction heads, where the backbone is pretrained on source datasets and frozen for new scenes, and only lightweight heads are optimized. However, we find that this paradigm heavily depends on the pretrained backbone. Existing decoupled methods can match conventional SCR methods fully optimized for each new scene when LiDAR configurations are similar to those used during backbone pretraining, but their accuracy drops noticeably on datasets collected with different LiDAR sensors. This suggests that efficient LiDAR localization requires representations that capture stable scene geometry across LiDAR configurations. Motivated by this observation, we propose LightLoc++, a sensor-robust and efficient outdoor LiDAR localization framework. To support sensor-robust representation learning, we introduce SULID, a synchronized urban multi-LiDAR dataset with representative 32-, 64-, and 128-beam rotating LiDARs, extensive cross-sensor overlap, and diverse urban scenes. Using SULID, we pretrain a sensor-robust backbone through cross-sensor consistency learning. LightLoc++ further preserves efficient new-scene learning by incorporating sample classification guidance and redundant sample downsampling, which reduce regression ambiguity and computational redundancy in large-scale outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments on multiple outdoor LiDAR localization benchmarks demonstrate that LightLoc++ achieves state-of-the-art localization performance with the lowest new-scene training cost among compared methods. Code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/liw95/LightLoc-PlusPlus.
LiDAR-based Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) maps point clouds directly to 3D scene coordinates, enabling precise 6-DoF localisation without explicit map retrieval. However, existing methods produce deterministic predictions, discarding aleatoric uncertainty that could improve robustness and downstream decision-making. We present UQ-Loc, which extends the LightLoc architecture with an anisotropic Gaussian covariance head that predicts a full 3x3 positive-definite covariance matrix per voxel. Training uses a Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) loss augmented with a kNN-based spatial smoothness regulariser, while inference employs a modified SC2-PCR solver with uncertainty-weighted seed scoring and a Mahalanobis-distance inlier test. We adopt Expected Calibration Error (ECE) as a principled metric for evaluating the quality of the predicted uncertainty. Experiments demonstrate that UQ-Loc achieves consistent improvement in 6-DoF localization accuracy while producing well-calibrated covariances.
6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning-based localization methods have achieved promising performance so far. However, as one of the always-on modules competing for limited on-board computational resources, the localization module is expected to consume only a small portion of the overall compute budget. Most existing learning-based methods are still too heavy for this purpose. In contrast, binary neural networks (BNNs) offer an appealing solution, but the 1-bit compression causes severe information loss and performance drop. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Binarized LiDAR-based Localization (BiLoc), the first binary neural network framework for 6-DoF LiDAR localization. Specifically, we reinterpret the training of BNNs from the perspective of the information-bottleneck principle, aiming at retaining minimal yet sufficient representations for pose estimation while suppressing redundant variations. And we introduce an auxiliary objective that adaptively regulates information retention in the binary encoder, effectively mitigating the information loss caused by binarization. This auxiliary objective provides additional optimization signals that compensate for the limited representational capacity and the gradient mismatch inherent in BNNs. Extensive experiments on large-scale outdoor LiDAR datasets demonstrate that BiLoc establishes a new state of the art for LiDAR localization with BNNs.
Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.