Local-To-Global Point Cloud Registration Using a Dictionary of Viewpoint Descriptors

David Avidar, David Malah, Meir Barzohar; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 891-899

Local-to global point cloud registration is a challenging task due to the substantial differences between these two types of data, and the different techniques used to acquire them. Global clouds cover large-scale environments and are usually acquired aerially, e.g., 3D modeling of a city using Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). In contrast, local clouds are often acquired from ground level and at a much smaller range, for example, using Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS). The differences are often manifested in point density distribution, occlusions nature, and measurement noise. As a result of these differences, existing point cloud registration approaches, such as keypoint-based registration, tend to fail. We improve upon a different approach, recently proposed, based on converting the global cloud into a viewpoint-based cloud dictionary. We propose a local-to-global registration method where we replace the dictionary clouds with viewpoint descriptors, consisting of panoramic range-images. We then use an efficient dictionary search in the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) domain, using phase correlation, to rapidly find plausible transformations from the local to the global reference frame. We demonstrate our method's significant advantages over the previous cloud dictionary approach, in terms of computational efficiency and memory requirements. In addition, We show its superior registration performance in comparison to a state-of-the-art, keypoint-based method (FPFH). For the evaluation, we use a challenging dataset of TLS local clouds and an ALS large-scale global cloud, in an urban environment.