DiffLO: Semantic-Aware LiDAR Odometry with Diffusion-Based Refinement

LiDAR odometry is a critical module in autonomous driving systems, responsible for accurate localization by estimating the relative pose transformation between consecutive point cloud frames. However, existing studies frequently encounter challenges with unreliable pose estimation, due to the lack of in-depth understanding of scenario and the presence of noise interference. To address this challenge, we propose DiffLO, a semantic-aware LiDAR odometry network with diffusion-based refinement. To mitigate the impact of challenging cases such as dynamic, repetitive patterns, and low textures, we introduce a semantic distillation method that integrates semantic information into the odometry task. This allows the network to gain a semantic understanding of the scene, enabling it to focus more on the objects that are beneficial for pose estimation. Additionally, to enhance the robustness, we propose a diffusion-based refinement method. This method uses pose-related features as conditional constraints for generative diversity, iteratively refining the pose estimation to achieve greater accuracy. Comparative experiments on the KITTI odometry dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance. In particular, the proposed DiffLO is not only more robust than the classic method A-LOAM, but also has better generalization ability than existing learning-based methods. The code will be released.