KSS-ICP: Point Cloud Registration based on Kendall Shape Space

Point cloud registration is a popular topic that has been widely used in 3D model reconstruction, location, and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new registration method, KSS-ICP, to address the rigid registration task in Kendall shape space (KSS) with Iterative Closest Point (ICP). The KSS is a quotient space that removes influences of translations, scales, and rotations for shape feature-based analysis. Such influences can be concluded as the similarity transformations that do not change the shape feature. The point cloud representation in KSS is invariant to similarity transformations. We utilize such property to design the KSS-ICP for point cloud registration. To tackle the difficulty to achieve the KSS representation in general, the proposed KSS-ICP formulates a practical solution that does not require complex feature analysis, data training, and optimization. With a simple implementation, KSS-ICP achieves more accurate registration from point clouds. It is robust to similarity transformation, non-uniform density, noise, and defective parts. Experiments show that KSS-ICP has better performance than the state-of-the-art. Code 1 and executable files 2 are made public.