R3PM-Net: Real-time, Robust, Real-world Point Matching Network

TL;DR

R3PM-Net is a fast, robust point matching network designed for real-world 3D point cloud registration, achieving high accuracy and speed on challenging industrial datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight, global-aware network and new datasets to improve real-world applicability of point cloud registration methods.

Findings

Achieves perfect fitness score of 1 on ModelNet40 in 0.007s

Maintains high accuracy on industrial datasets with low latency

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speed by approximately 7 times

Abstract

Accurate Point Cloud Registration (PCR) is an important task in 3D data processing, involving the estimation of a rigid transformation between two point clouds. While deep-learning methods have addressed key limitations of traditional non-learning approaches, such as sensitivity to noise, outliers, occlusion, and initialization, they are developed and evaluated on clean, dense, synthetic datasets (limiting their generalizability to real-world industrial scenarios). This paper introduces R3PM-Net, a lightweight, global-aware, object-level point matching network designed to bridge this gap by prioritizing both generalizability and real-time efficiency. To support this transition, two datasets, Sioux-Cranfield and Sioux-Scans, are proposed. They provide an evaluation ground for registering imperfect photogrammetric and event-camera scans to digital CAD models, and have been made publicly available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that R3PM-Net achieves competitive accuracy with unmatched speed. On ModelNet40, it reaches a perfect fitness score of $1$ and inlier RMSE of $0.029$ cm in only $0.007$s, approximately 7 times faster than the state-of-the-art method RegTR. This performance carries over to the Sioux-Cranfield dataset, maintaining a fitness of $1$ and inlier RMSE of $0.030$ cm with similarly low latency. Furthermore, on the highly challenging Sioux-Scans dataset, R3PM-Net successfully resolves edge cases in under 50 ms. These results confirm that R3PM-Net offers a robust, high-speed solution for critical industrial applications, where precision and real-time performance are indispensable. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/YasiiKB/R3PM-Net.