A Coarse-to-Fine Algorithm for Matching and Registration in 3D Cross-Source Point Clouds

We propose an efficient method to deal with the matching and registration problem found in cross-source point clouds captured by different types of sensors. This task is especially challenging due to the presence of density variation, scale difference, a large proportion of noise and outliers, missing data, and viewpoint variation. The proposed method has two stages: in the coarse matching stage, we use the ensemble of shape functions descriptor to select potential K regions from the candidate point clouds for the target. In the fine stage, we propose a scale embedded generative Gaussian mixture models registration method to refine the results from the coarse matching stage. Following the fine stage, both the best region and accurate camera pose relationships between the candidates and target are found. We conduct experiments in which we apply the method to two applications: one is 3D object detection and localization in street-view outdoor (LiDAR/VSFM) cross-source point clouds and the other is 3D scene matching and registration in indoor (KinectFusion/VSFM) cross-source point clouds. The experiment results show that the proposed method performs well when compared with the existing methods. It also shows that the proposed method is robust under various sensing techniques, such as LiDAR, Kinect, and RGB camera.