Robust 3D Features for Matching between Distorted Range Scans Captured by Moving Systems

Xiangqi Huang, Bo Zheng, Takeshi Masuda, Katsushi Ikeuchi; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 2957-2964

Laser range sensors are often demanded to mount on a moving platform for achieving the good efficiency of 3D reconstruction. However, such moving systems often suffer from the difficulty of matching the distorted range scans. In this paper, we propose novel 3D features which can be robustly extracted and matched even for the distorted 3D surface captured by a moving system. Our feature extraction employs Morse theory to construct Morse functions which capture the critical points approximately invariant to the 3D surface distortion. Then for each critical point, we extract support regions with the maximally stable region defined by extremal region or disconnectivity. Our feature description is designed as two steps: 1) we normalize the detected local regions to canonical shapes for robust matching; 2) we encode each key point with multiple vectors at different Morse function values. In experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed 3D features achieve substantially better performance for distorted surface matching than the state-of-the-art methods.