  We present a novel deep convolutional network pipeline, LO-Net, for real-time
lidar odometry estimation. Unlike most existing lidar odometry (LO) estimations
that go through individually designed feature selection, feature matching, and
pose estimation pipeline, LO-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner. With a
new mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, LO-Net can effectively learn
feature representation for LO estimation, and can implicitly exploit the
sequential dependencies and dynamics in the data. We also design a scan-to-map
module, which uses the geometric and semantic information learned in LO-Net, to
improve the estimation accuracy. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate
that LO-Net outperforms existing learning based approaches and has similar
accuracy with the state-of-the-art geometry-based approach, LOAM.
