PLADE: A Plane-Based Descriptor for Point Cloud Registration With Small Overlap

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 2530 - 2540
• Main Authors: Chen, Songlin, Nan, Liangliang, Xia, Renbo, Zhao, Jibin, Wonka, Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Buildings; Data; Data acquisition; Datasets; descriptor; Feature extraction; Methods; point cloud; Registration; Scanners; scanning; Semantics; STEM; Task analysis; Three-dimensional displays
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2019.2952086

Traditional point cloud registration methods require large overlap between scans, which imposes strict constraints on data acquisition. To facilitate registration, users have to carefully position scanners to ensure sufficient overlap. In this article, we propose to use high-level structural information (i.e., plane/line features and their interrelationship) for registration, which is capable of registering point clouds with small overlap, allowing more freedom in data acquisition. We design a novel plane-/line-based descriptor dedicated to establishing structure-level correspondences between point clouds. Based on this descriptor, we propose a simple but effective registration algorithm. We also provide a data set of real-world scenes containing a larger number of scans with a wide range of overlap. Experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on various data sets reveal that our method is superior to existing techniques. Though the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the most challenging data set, the point cloud registration problem is still far from being solved, leaving significant room for improvement and future work.