Sensors producing 3D point clouds such as 3D laser scanners and RGB-D cameras are widely used in robotics, be it for autonomous driving or manipulation. Aligning point clouds produced by these sensors is a vital component in such applications to perform tasks such as model registration, pose estimation, and SLAM. Iterative closest point (ICP) is the most widely used method for this task, due to its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel method which solves the optimisation problem posed by ICP using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Using SGD allows us to improve the convergence speed of ICP without sacrificing solution quality. Experiments using Kinect as well as Velodyne data show that, our proposed method is faster than existing methods, while obtaining solutions comparable to standard ICP. An additional benefit is robustness to parameters when processing data from different sensors.
Selecting corresponding points in the source and reference point clouds is an important step in ICP, as evidenced by the various ICP variants that have been proposed in the literature to improve this part of ICP. @cite_7 use simulated annealing to obtain a good initial starting point. Masuda and Yokoyo @cite_16 combine a least median square estimator and ICP using random samples of points in each iteration. While this method uses random sub-sampling, the goal is to remove outliers from the point cloud processed by ICP and does not perform incremental updates of the transformation estimate as our proposed method does.
@cite_16 @cite_7
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Despite the fact that original Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm has been widely used for registration, itcannot tackle the problem when two point clouds are par-tially overlapping. Accordingly, this paper proposes a ro-bust approach for the registration of partially overlappingpoint clouds. Given two initially posed clouds, it firstlybuilds up bilateral correspondence and computes bidirec-tional distances for each point in the data shape. Based onthe ratio of bidirectional distances, the exponential functionis selected and utilized to calculate the probability value,which can indicate whether the point pair belongs to theoverlapping part or not. Subsequently, the probability val-ue can be embedded into the least square function for reg-istration of partially overlapping point clouds and a novelvariant of ICP algorithm is presented to obtain the optimalrigid transformation. The proposed approach can achievegood registration of point clouds, even when their overlappercentage is low. Experimental results tested on public da-ta sets illustrate its superiority over previous approaches onrobustness. In this paper we investigate the usage of persistent point feature histograms for the problem of aligning point cloud data views into a consistent global model. Given a collection of noisy point clouds, our algorithm estimates a set of robust 16D features which describe the geometry of each point locally. By analyzing the persistence of the features at different scales, we extract an optimal set which best characterizes a given point cloud. The resulted persistent features are used in an initial alignment algorithm to estimate a rigid transformation that approximately registers the input datasets. The algorithm provides good starting points for iterative registration algorithms such as ICP (Iterative Closest Point), by transforming the datasets to its convergence basin. We show that our approach is invariant to pose and sampling density, and can cope well with noisy data coming from both indoor and outdoor laser scans. Point cloud matching is a central problem in Object Modeling with applications in Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. Although the problem is well studied in the case when an initial estimate of the relative pose is known (fine matching), the problem becomes much more difficult when this a priori knowledge is not available (coarse matching). In this paper we introduce a novel technique to speed up coarse matching algorithms for point clouds. This new technique, called Hierarchical Normal Space Sampling (HNSS), extends Normal Space Sampling by grouping points hierarchically according to the distribution of their normal vectors. This hierarchy guides the search for corresponding points while staying free of user intervention. This permits to navigate through the huge search space taking advantage of geometric information and to stop when a sufficiently good initial pose is found. This initial pose can then be used as the starting point for any fine matching algorithm. Hierarchical Normal Space Sampling is adaptable to different searching strategies and shape descriptors. To illustrate HNSS, we present experiments using both synthetic and real data that show the computational complexity of the problem, the computation time reduction obtained by HNSS and the application potentials in combination with ICP. We present a robot-pose-registration algorithm, which is entirely based on large planar-surface patches extracted from point clouds sampled from a three-dimensional (3-D) sensor. This approach offers an alternative to the traditional point-to-point iterative-closest-point (ICP) algorithm, its point-to-plane variant, as well as newer grid-based algorithms, such as the 3-D normal distribution transform (NDT). The simpler case of known plane correspondences is tackled first by deriving expressions for least-squares pose estimation considering plane-parameter uncertainty computed during plane extraction. Closed-form expressions for covariances are also derived. To round-off the solution, we present a new algorithm, which is called minimally uncertain maximal consensus (MUMC), to determine the unknown plane correspondences by maximizing geometric consistency by minimizing the uncertainty volume in configuration space. Experimental results from three 3-D sensors, viz., Swiss-Ranger, University of South Florida Odetics Laser Detection and Ranging, and an actuated SICK S300, are given. The first two have low fields of view (FOV) and moderate ranges, while the third has a much bigger FOV and range. Experimental results show that this approach is not only more robust than point- or grid-based approaches in plane-rich environments, but it is also faster, requires significantly less memory, and offers a less-cluttered planar-patches-based visualization.