SGMR-LPR: A Semantic-Guided Network Robust to Movable Objects for LiDAR-Based Place Recognition

Robust LiDAR point cloud processing in dynamic outdoor environments, where movable objects such as vehicles and pedestrians introduce significant structural uncertainty, remains a key challenge for remote sensing and autonomous systems. This work addresses LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR), a critical component for loop closure and re-localization that is highly susceptible to such dynamics. While semantic information is beneficial, existing methods often require external segmentation models at inference or lack explicit mechanisms to suppress movable objects under uncertain predictions. To address these limitations, we propose SGMR-LPR, an end-to-end semantic-guided framework designed to explicitly counteract movable-object interference during feature encoding. Building on the “segmentation-while-describing” paradigm, SGMR-LPR incorporates an internal semantic segmentation branch and two novel modules: a probabilistic movable object masking (PMOM) module, which transforms semantic logits into continuous, uncertainty-aware masks of movable regions; and a movable-suppressed channel–spatial attention (MSCS) module, which uses these masks to adaptively modulate high-level BEV features—suppressing responses from movable-object regions while enhancing stable structural elements. By embedding explicit movable-awareness into feature modulation, SGMR-LPR achieves enhanced robustness without external semantic models at inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains, particularly in scenes with dense movable objects, advancing reliable point cloud-based scene understanding in dynamic environments.