Robust-DefReg: A Robust Deformable Point Cloud Registration Method based on Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

TL;DR

Robust-DefReg is a novel end-to-end graph convolutional neural network-based method that achieves high-accuracy, robust, and efficient non-rigid point cloud registration across various challenges.

Contribution

It introduces Robust-DefReg, a coarse-to-fine, end-to-end registration approach leveraging GCNNs for improved robustness and accuracy in non-rigid point cloud registration.

Findings

Achieves high accuracy in large deformations

Maintains robustness against noise and outliers

Operates with high computational efficiency

Abstract

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in computer vision that aims to estimate the transformation between corresponding sets of points. Non-rigid registration, in particular, involves addressing challenges including various levels of deformation, noise, outliers, and data incompleteness. This paper introduces Robust-DefReg, a robust non-rigid point cloud registration method based on graph convolutional networks (GCNNs). Robust-DefReg is a coarse-to-fine registration approach within an end-to-end pipeline, leveraging the advantages of both coarse and fine methods. The method learns global features to find correspondences between source and target point clouds, to enable appropriate initial alignment, and subsequently fine registration. The simultaneous achievement of high accuracy and robustness across all challenges is reported less frequently in existing studies, making it a key objective of the Robust-DefReg method. The proposed method achieves high accuracy in large deformations while maintaining computational efficiency. This method possesses three primary attributes: high accuracy, robustness to different challenges, and computational efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed Robust-DefReg holds significant potential as a foundational architecture for future investigations in non-rigid point cloud registration. The source code of Robust-DefReg is available.