Generalized-CVO: Fast and Correspondence-Free Local Point Cloud Registration with Second Order Riemannian Optimization

Ray Zhang, Marcus Greiff, Thomas Lew, John Subosits; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 2948-2958

We propose a fast and correspondence-free local point cloud registration method that leverages geometric surface structure and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embeddings. The method represents point clouds as continuous functions with point-wise anisotropic kernels that encode local geometry. This formulation improves alignment along surface normals while relaxing alignment along tangential directions. To solve the resulting registration problem, we propose a second-order on-manifold optimization scheme with approximate Riemannian Hessians, achieving a speedup of up to 10x over the first-order solvers used in prior correspondence-free RKHS-based methods. We demonstrate improved frame-to-frame LiDAR and RGB-D tracking accuracy across diverse indoor and outdoor datasets. On a LiDAR tracking registration task in the driving domain, we achieve a reduction of >55% in both translational and rotational drift in challenging feature-sparse environments. On object registration benchmarks, we show improved robustness over ICP-based methods and further gains when refining global initialization, particularly under moderate misalignment.