SuP: Sub-cloud Driven Point Cloud Registration

Sheldon Fung, Wei Pan, Ling Cao, Fei Hou, Ling Chen, Shasha Mao, Hongdong Li, Xuequan Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 24185-24194

While existing point-cloud-registration methods can well handle high-overlap scenarios of two point clouds, they often struggle with low-overlap scenarios, due to inevitable geometric/semantic ambiguities in the non-overlapping regions. In this paper, we introduce SuP, a novel framework that reformulates low-overlap registration as a high-overlap sub-cloud pairs (anchor pairs) mining problem. Central to SuP is our Dual-phase Sub-cloud Anchor Mining (DSAM) module, which first subdivides the source and target point clouds into multiple sub-clouds, followed by introducing a dual-phase weighting pipeline: 1) an efficient overlap-guided prior-weighting scheme (OPS) that leverages feature salience to identify candidate anchor pairs, and 2) a multi-scale post-weighting network (MPN) that exploits neighborhood feature consensus to further identify anchor pairs. Subsequently, final correspondences are generated through a merge-to-match module using the anchor pairs. To train DSAM, we design an alignment-aware weighting loss that uses on-the-fly alignment errors as supervision. Comprehensive experiments on the color-enhanced 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch demonstrate that SuP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher registration recall and more accurate alignment, especially under challenging low-overlap conditions.