Point Cloud Registration with Virtual Interest Points from Implicit Quadric Surface Intersections

A novel method is presented to robustly and efficiently register two partially overlapping point clouds. Following segmentation, the regions are represented as implicit quadric surfaces using polynomials of degree two in three variables. The registration establishes correspondences of virtual interest points, which do not exist in the original point cloud data, and are defined by the intersection of three implicit quadric surfaces extracted from the point cloud regions. Implicit quadric surfaces exist in abundance in both natural and architectural scenes, and can be used to identify stable regions in the data, which in turn leads to repeatable virtual interest points. Large regions in a point cloud can be represented by a few implicit surfaces, which reduces the computational cost of registration and also makes the algorithm robust to noise and data density variations. Experiments were performed on seven data sets from various sensors. The proposed method outperformed most of the feature based registration and non-feature based registration methods for computational efficiency and convergence.