Point cloud registration is a central theme in computer vision, with alignment algorithms continuously improving for greater robustness. Commonly used methods evaluate Euclidean distances between point clouds and minimize an objective function, such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). However, these approaches are most effective when the point clouds are well-prealigned and issues such as differences in density, noise, holes, and limited overlap can compromise the results. Traditional methods, such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP), require choosing one point cloud as fixed, since Euclidean distances lack commutativity. When only one point cloud has issues, adjustments can be made, but in real scenarios, both point clouds may be affected, often necessitating preprocessing. The authors introduce a novel differential entropy-based metric, designed to serve as the objective function within an optimization framework for fine rigid pairwise 3D point cloud registration, denoted as Iterative Differential Entropy Minimization (IDEM). This metric does not depend on the choice of a fixed point cloud and, during transformations, reveals a clear minimum corresponding to the best alignment. Multiple case studies are conducted, and the results are compared with those obtained using RMSE, Chamfer distance, and Hausdorff distance. The proposed metric proves effective even with density differences, noise, holes, and partial overlap, where RMSE does not always yield optimal alignment.
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Registration is a fundamental but critical task in point cloud processing, which usually depends on finding element correspondence from two point clouds. However, the finding of reliable correspondence relies on establishing a robust and discriminative description of elements and the correct matching of corresponding elements. In this letter, we develop a coarse-to-fine registration strategy, which utilizes rotation-invariant features and a new weighted graph matching method for iteratively finding correspondence. In the graph matching method, the similarity of nodes and edges in Euclidean and…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
A popular paradigm for 3D point cloud registration is by extracting 3D keypoint correspondences, then estimating the registration function from the correspondences using a robust algorithm. However, many existing 3D keypoint techniques tend to produce large proportions of erroneous correspondences or outliers, which significantly increases the cost of robust estimation. An alternative approach is to directly search for the subset of correspondences that are pairwise consistent, without optimising the registration function. This gives rise to the combinatorial problem of matching with pairwise …
In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine integration solution inspired by the classical ICP algorithm, to pairwise 3D point cloud registration with two improvements of hybrid metric spaces (eg, BSC feature and Euclidean geometry spaces) and globally optimal correspondences matching. First, we detect the keypoints of point clouds and use the Binary Shape Context (BSC) descriptor to encode their local features. Then, we formulate the correspondence matching task as an energy function, which models the global similarity of keypoints on the hybrid spaces of BSC feature and Euclidean geometry. Ne…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究院）；UBC（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；SFU（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
We introduce a technique for pairwise registration of neural fields that extends classical optimization-based local registration (i.e. ICP) to operate on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) -- neural 3D scene representations trained from collections of calibrated images. NeRF does not decompose illumination and color, so to make registration invariant to illumination, we introduce the concept of a ''surface field'' -- a field distilled from a pre-trained NeRF model that measures the likelihood of a point being on the surface of an object. We then cast nerf2nerf registration as a robust optimization …
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；School of Electronics and Control Engineering, Chang’an University（长安大学电子与控制工程学院）；School of Architecture & Urban Planning, Shenzhen University（深圳大学建筑与城市规划学院）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Siemens AG（西门子股份公司）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
We present a novel, data driven approach for solving the problem of registration of two point cloud scans. Our approach is direct in the sense that a single pair of corresponding local patches already provides the necessary transformation cue for the global registration. To achieve that, we first endow the state of the art PPF-FoldNet auto-encoder (AE) with a pose-variant sibling, where the discrepancy between the two leads to pose-specific descriptors. Based upon this, we introduce RelativeNet, a relative pose estimation network to assign correspondence-specific orientations to the keypoints,…
RARE: Refine Any Registration of Pairwise Point Clouds via Zero-Shot Learning
College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shenzhen Research Institute, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学深圳研究院）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（岭南大学数据科学学院）
Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University（首都师范大学交叉科学研究院）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Imaging Theory and Technology, Capital Normal University（首都师范大学成像技术高精尖创新中心）；DUT-RU ISE, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学DUT-RU ISE）；State University of New York at Stony Brook（纽约州立大学石溪分校）
We present a novel, effective method for global point cloud registration problems by geometric topology. Based on many point cloud pairwise registration methods (e.g ICP), we focus on the problem of accumulated error for the composition of transformations along any loops. The major technical contribution of this paper is a linear method for the elimination of errors, using only solving a Poisson equation. We demonstrate the consistency of our method from Hodge-Helmhotz decomposition theorem and experiments on multiple RGBD datasets of real-world scenes. The experimental results also demonstrat…
Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica（国家计算科学实验室）；Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora（茹伊斯迪福拉联邦大学）
In the last decades, some literature appeared using the Lie groups theory to solve problems in computer vision. On the other hand, Lie algebraic representations of the transformations therein were introduced to overcome the difficulties behind group structure by mapping the transformation groups to linear spaces. In this paper we focus on application of Lie groups and Lie algebras to find the rigid transformation that best register two surfaces represented by point clouds. The so called pairwise rigid registration can be formulated by comparing intrinsic second-order orientation tensors that e…
We present SyNoRiM, a novel way to jointly register multiple non-rigid shapes by synchronizing the maps relating learned functions defined on the point clouds. Even though the ability to process non-rigid shapes is critical in various applications ranging from computer animation to 3D digitization, the literature still lacks a robust and flexible framework to match and align a collection of real, noisy scans observed under occlusions. Given a set of such point clouds, our method first computes the pairwise correspondences parameterized via functional maps. We simultaneously learn potentially n…
Point cloud registration is the task of estimating the rigid transformation that aligns a pair of point cloud fragments. We present an efficient and robust framework for pairwise registration of real-world 3D scans, leveraging Hough voting in the 6D transformation parameter space. First, deep geometric features are extracted from a point cloud pair to compute putative correspondences. We then construct a set of triplets of correspondences to cast votes on the 6D Hough space, representing the transformation parameters in sparse tensors. Next, a fully convolutional refinement module is applied t…
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Megvii Inc.（旷视科技）
In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based pipeline for partially overlapping 3D point cloud registration. The proposed model includes an iterative distance-aware similarity matrix convolution module to incorporate information from both the feature and Euclidean space into the pairwise point matching process. These convolution layers learn to match points based on joint information of the entire geometric features and Euclidean offset for each point pair, overcoming the disadvantage of matching by simply taking the inner product of feature vectors. Furthermore, a two-stage learnable poin…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Removing outlier correspondences is one of the critical steps for successful feature-based point cloud registration. Despite the increasing popularity of introducing deep learning methods in this field, spatial consistency, which is essentially established by a Euclidean transformation between point clouds, has received almost no individual attention in existing learning frameworks. In this paper, we present PointDSC, a novel deep neural network that explicitly incorporates spatial consistency for pruning outlier correspondences. First, we propose a nonlocal feature aggregation module, weighte…
We introduce PREDATOR, a model for pairwise point-cloud registration with deep attention to the overlap region. Different from previous work, our model is specifically designed to handle (also) point-cloud pairs with low overlap. Its key novelty is an overlap-attention block for early information exchange between the latent encodings of the two point clouds. In this way the subsequent decoding of the latent representations into per-point features is conditioned on the respective other point cloud, and thus can predict which points are not only salient, but also lie in the overlap region betwee…
Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition（模式识别国家重点实验室）；Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学人工智能研究院）；National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University（北京大学国家生物医学成像中心）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；UCAS（中国科学院大学）
This study presents a high-accuracy, efficient, and physically induced method for 3D point cloud registration, which is the core of many important 3D vision problems. In contrast to existing physics-based methods that merely consider spatial point information and ignore surface geometry, we explore geometry aware rigid-body dynamics to regulate the particle (point) motion, which results in more precise and robust registration. Our proposed method consists of four major modules. First, we leverage the graph signal processing (GSP) framework to define a new signature, (i.e., point response inten…
We present a novel, end-to-end learnable, multiview 3D point cloud registration algorithm. Registration of multiple scans typically follows a two-stage pipeline: the initial pairwise alignment and the globally consistent refinement. The former is often ambiguous due to the low overlap of neighboring point clouds, symmetries and repetitive scene parts. Therefore, the latter global refinement aims at establishing the cyclic consistency across multiple scans and helps in resolving the ambiguous cases. In this paper we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end algorithm for joint…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）
Point cloud registration methods can effectively handle large-scale, partially overlapping point cloud pairs. Despite its practicality, matching the unbalanced pairs in terms of spatial extent and density has been overlooked and rarely studied. We present a novel method, dubbed UPPNet, for Unbalanced Point cloud Pair registration. We propose to incorporate a hierarchical framework that effectively finds inlier correspondences by gradually reducing search space. The proposed method first predicts subregions within target point cloud that are likely to be overlapped with query. Then following su…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Shanghai FOCS Instrument Analysis Co., Ltd.（上海福斯仪器分析有限公司）
Correspondence-based point cloud registration is a cornerstone in robotics perception and computer vision, which seeks to estimate the best rigid transformation aligning two point clouds from the putative correspondences. However, due to the limited robustness of 3D keypoint matching approaches, outliers, probably in large numbers, are prone to exist among the correspondences, which makes robust registration methods imperative. Unfortunately, existing robust methods have their own limitations (e.g. high computational cost or limited robustness) when facing high or extreme outlier ratios, proba…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Atlas building and image registration are important tasks for medical image analysis. Once one or multiple atlases from an image population have been constructed, commonly (1) images are warped into an atlas space to study intra-subject or inter-subject variations or (2) a possibly probabilistic atlas is warped into image space to assign anatomical labels. Atlas estimation and nonparametric transformations are computationally expensive as they usually require numerical optimization. Additionally, previous approaches for atlas building often define similarity measures between a fuzzy atlas and …
Problems of segmentation, denoising, registration and 3D reconstruction are often addressed with the graph cut algorithm. However, solving an unconstrained graph cut problem is NP-hard. For tractable optimization, pairwise potentials have to fulfill the submodularity inequality. In our learning paradigm, pairwise potentials are created as the dot product of a learned vector w with positive feature vectors. In order to constrain such a model to remain tractable, previous approaches have enforced the weight vector to be positive for pairwise potentials in which the labels differ, and set pairwis…
Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands（荷兰乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学中心）；Department of Radiology, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands（荷兰乌得勒支大学医学中心放射科）
Motion correction of dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance images (DCE-MRI) is a challenging task, due to changes in image appearance. In this study a groupwise registration, using a principle component analysis (PCA) based metric,1 is evaluated for clinical DCE MRI of the liver. The groupwise registration transforms the images to a common space, rather than to a reference volume as conventional pairwise methods do, and computes the similarity metric on all volumes simultaneously. This groupwise registration method is compared to a pairwise approach using a mutual information metric. Cl…
BrainMorph: A Foundational Keypoint Model for Robust and Flexible Brain MRI Registration
Department of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City, NY, USA（韦尔·科恩医学中心放射科）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA（康奈尔大学电气与计算机工程学院）；Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
本文提出基于 KeyMorph 的 BrainMorph 关键点基础模型，利用超十万个 3D 脑 MRI 体积训练，实现鲁棒、可解释、快速可控的多模态成对与组级刚性、仿射及非线性配准。
Pairwise point cloud registration is a critical task for many applications, which heavily depends on finding correct correspondences from the two point clouds. However, the low overlap between input point clouds causes the registration to fail easily, leading to mistaken overlapping and mismatched correspondences, especially in scenes where non-overlapping regions contain similar structures. In this paper, we present a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) model for jointly learning of 3D local features and overlap estimation to fulfill pairwise registration and loop closure. Feature description is pe…
University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）
Consider the problem of registering multiple point sets in some $d$-dimensional space using rotations and translations. Assume that there are sets with common points, and moreover the pairwise correspondences are known for such sets. We consider a least-squares formulation of this problem, where the variables are the transforms associated with the point sets. The present novelty is that we reduce this nonconvex problem to an optimization over the positive semidefinite cone, where the objective is linear but the constraints are nevertheless nonconvex. We propose to solve this using variable spl…
Rigid slice-to-volume registration is a challenging task, which finds application in medical imaging problems like image fusion for image guided surgeries and motion correction for volume reconstruction. It is usually formulated as an optimization problem and solved using standard continuous methods. In this paper, we discuss how this task be formulated as a discrete labeling problem on a graph. Inspired by previous works on discrete estimation of linear transformations using Markov Random Fields (MRFs), we model it using a pairwise MRF, where the nodes are associated to the rigid parameters, …
We propose a novel method for large-scale image stitching that is robust against repetitive patterns and featureless regions in the imagery. In such cases, state-of-the-art image stitching methods easily produce image alignment artifacts, since they may produce false pairwise image registrations that are in conflict within the global connectivity graph. Our method augments the current methods by collecting all the plausible pairwise image registration candidates, among which globally consistent candidates are chosen. This enables the stitching process to determine the correct pairwise registra…
Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Learning to autonomously assemble shapes is a crucial skill for many robotic applications. While the majority of existing part assembly methods focus on correctly posing semantic parts to recreate a whole object, we interpret assembly more literally: as mating geometric parts together to achieve a snug fit. By focusing on shape alignment rather than semantic cues, we can achieve across-category generalization. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, pairwise 3D geometric shape mating, and propose Neural Shape Mating (NSM) to tackle this problem. Given the point clouds of two object parts of …
Improve Myocardial Strain Estimation based on Deformable Groupwise Registration with a Locally Low-Rank Dissimilarity Metric
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；School of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程学院）；National Engineering Research Center of Advanced Magnetic Resonance Technologies for Diagnosis and Therapy（国家医学诊疗先进磁共振技术工程研究中心）；Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院附属仁济医院）
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；The University of Utah（犹他大学）
3D scan registration is a classical, yet a highly useful problem in the context of 3D sensors such as Kinect and Velodyne. While there are several existing methods, the techniques are usually incremental where adjacent scans are registered first to obtain the initial poses, followed by motion averaging and bundle-adjustment refinement. In this paper, we take a different approach and develop minimal solvers for jointly computing the initial poses of cameras in small loops such as 3-, 4-, and 5-cycles. Note that the classical registration of 2 scans can be done using a minimum of 3 point matches…
This research proposes a novel adjustable algorithm for reconstructing 3D body shapes from front and side silhouettes. Most recent silhouette-based approaches use a deep neural network trained by silhouettes and key points to estimate the shape parameters but cannot accurately fit the model to the body contours and consequently are struggling to cover detailed body geometry, especially in the torso. In addition, in most of these cases, body parts have the same accuracy priority, making the optimization harder and avoiding reaching the optimum possible result in essential body parts, like the t…
This paper addresses the problem of registering multiple point sets. Solutions to this problem are often approximated by repeatedly solving for pairwise registration, which results in an uneven treatment of the sets forming a pair: a model set and a data set. The main drawback of this strategy is that the model set may contain noise and outliers, which negatively affects the estimation of the registration parameters. In contrast, the proposed formulation treats all the point sets on an equal footing. Indeed, all the points are drawn from a central Gaussian mixture, hence the registration is ca…
We explore different curriculum learning methods for training convolutional neural networks on the task of deformable pairwise 3D medical image registration. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to attempt to improve performance by training medical image registration models using curriculum learning, starting from an easy training setup in the first training stages, and gradually increasing the complexity of the setup. On the one hand, we consider two existing curriculum learning approaches, namely curriculum dropout and curriculum by smoothing. On the other hand, we propose a novel …
Attention-aware non-rigid image registration for accelerated MR imaging
University Hospital of Tuebingen（蒂宾根大学医院）；Klinikum Rechts der Isar（右岸医院（慕尼黑工业大学附属））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学计算、信息与技术学院）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reconstruct 3D human body shapes based on a sparse set of RGBD frames using a single RGBD camera. We specifically focus on the realistic settings where human subjects move freely during the capture. The main challenge is how to robustly fuse these sparse frames into a canonical 3D model, under pose changes and surface occlusions. This is addressed by our new framework consisting of the following steps. First, based on a generative human template, for every two frames having sufficient overlap, an initial pairwise alignment is performed; It is follo…
