GPU-Accelerated 3D Normal Distributions Transform

The three-dimensional (3D) normal distributions transform (NDT) is a popular scan registration method for 3D point cloud datasets. It has been widely used in sensor-based localization and mapping appli-cations. However, the NDT cannot entirely utilize the computing power of modern many-core processors, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), because of the NDT's linear nature. In this study, we investi-gated the use of NVIDIA's GPUs and their program-ming platform called compute unified device architec-ture (CUDA) to accelerate the NDT algorithm. We proposed a design and implementation of our GPU-accelerated 3D NDT (GPU NDT). Our methods can achieve a speedup rate of up to 34 times, compared with the NDT implemented in the point cloud library (PCL).