When registering point clouds resolved from an underlying 2-D pixel structure, such as those resulting from structured light and flash LiDAR sensors, or stereo reconstruction, it is expected that some points in one cloud do not have corresponding points in the other cloud, and that these would occur together, such as along an edge of the depth map. In this work, a hidden Markov random field model is used to capture this prior within the framework of the iterative closest point algorithm. The EM algorithm is used to estimate the distribution parameters and the hidden component memberships. Experiments are presented demonstrating that this method outperforms several other outlier rejection methods when the point clouds have low or moderate overlap.
We present an algorithm for registration between a large-scale point cloud and a close-proximity scanned point cloud, providing a localization solution that is fully independent of prior information about the initial positions of the two point cloud coordinate systems. The algorithm, denoted LORAX, selects super-points&#x2013;local subsets of points&#x2013;and describes the geometric structure of each with a low-dimensional descriptor. These descriptors are then used to infer potential matching regions for an efficient coarse registration process, followed by a fine-tuning stage. The set of super-points is selected by covering the point clouds with overlapping spheres, and then filtering out those of low-quality or nonsalient regions. The descriptors are computed using state-of-the-art unsupervised machine learning, utilizing the technology of deep neural network based auto-encoders. Abstract This novel framework provides a strong alternative to the common practice of using manually designed key-point descriptors for coarse point cloud registration. Utilizing super-points instead of key-points allows the available geometrical data to be better exploited to find the correct transformation. Encoding local 3D geometric structures using a deep neural network auto-encoder instead of traditional descriptors continues the trend seen in other computer vision applications and indeed leads to superior results. The algorithm is tested on challenging point cloud registration datasets, and its advantages over previous approaches as well as its robustness to density changes, noise, and missing data are shown. A number of 3D local feature descriptors have been proposed in the literature. It is however, unclear which descriptors are more appropriate for a particular application. A good descriptor should be descriptive, compact, and robust to a set of nuisances. This paper compares ten popular local feature descriptors in the contexts of 3D object recognition, 3D shape retrieval, and 3D modeling. We first evaluate the descriptiveness of these descriptors on eight popular datasets which were acquired using different techniques. We then analyze their compactness using the recall of feature matching per each float value in the descriptor. We also test the robustness of the selected descriptors with respect to support radius variations, Gaussian noise, shot noise, varying mesh resolution, distance to the mesh boundary, keypoint localization error, occlusion, clutter, and dataset size. Moreover, we present the performance results of these descriptors when combined with different 3D keypoint detection methods. We finally analyze the computational efficiency for generating each descriptor.