CMM: LiDAR-Visual Fusion with Cross-Modality Module for Large-Scale Place Recognition

LiDAR and camera fusion have emerged as a promising approach for improving place recognition in robotics and autonomous vehicles. However, most existing approaches often treat sensors separately, overlooking the potential benefits of correlation between them. In this paper, we propose a Cross- Modality Module (CMM) to leverage the potential correlation of LiDAR and camera features for place recognition. Besides, to fully exploit potential of each modality, we propose a Local-Global Fusion Module to supplement global coarse-grained features with local fine-grained features. The experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively improves the average recall by 2.3%, reaching 98.7%, compared with simply stacking of LiDAR and camera.