C-GenReg: Training-Free 3D Point Cloud Registration by Multi-View-Consistent Geometry-to-Image Generation with Probabilistic Modalities Fusion

TL;DR

C-GenReg is a zero-shot, training-free 3D point cloud registration framework that uses multi-view-consistent image generation and probabilistic fusion to improve cross-domain generalization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel generative transfer approach with a fusion scheme that enhances robustness without any fine-tuning.

Findings

Achieves strong zero-shot performance on indoor and outdoor benchmarks.

Demonstrates successful registration on outdoor LiDAR data without imagery.

Outperforms existing methods in cross-domain generalization.

Abstract

We introduce C-GenReg, a training-free framework for 3D point cloud registration that leverages the complementary strengths of world-scale generative priors and registration-oriented Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Current learning-based 3D point cloud registration methods struggle to generalize across sensing modalities, sampling differences, and environments. Hence, C-GenReg augments the geometric point cloud registration branch by transferring the matching problem into an auxiliary image domain, where VFMs excel, using a World Foundation Model to synthesize multi-view-consistent RGB representations from the input geometry. This generative transfer, preserves spatial coherence across source and target views without any fine-tuning. From these generated views, a VFM pretrained for finding dense correspondences extracts matches. The resulting pixel correspondences are lifted back to 3D via the original depth maps. To further enhance robustness, we introduce a "Match-then-Fuse" probabilistic cold-fusion scheme that combines two independent correspondence posteriors, that of the generated-RGB branch with that of the raw geometric branch. This principled fusion preserves each modality inductive bias and provides calibrated confidence without any additional learning. C-GenReg is zero-shot and plug-and-play: all modules are pretrained and operate without fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on indoor (3DMatch, ScanNet) and outdoor (Waymo) benchmarks demonstrate strong zero-shot performance and superior cross-domain generalization. For the first time, we demonstrate a generative registration framework that operates successfully on real outdoor LiDAR data, where no imagery data is available.