APR: Online Distant Point Cloud Registration Through Aggregated Point Cloud Reconstruction

4 May 2023  ·  Quan Liu, Yunsong Zhou, Hongzi Zhu, Shan Chang, Minyi Guo ·

For many driving safety applications, it is of great importance to accurately register LiDAR point clouds generated on distant moving vehicles. However, such point clouds have extremely different point density and sensor perspective on the same object, making registration on such point clouds very hard. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction framework, called APR, for online distant point cloud registration. Specifically, APR leverages an autoencoder design, where the autoencoder reconstructs a denser aggregated point cloud with several frames instead of the original single input point cloud. Our design forces the encoder to extract features with rich local geometry information based on one single input point cloud. Such features are then used for online distant point cloud registration. We conduct extensive experiments against state-of-the-art (SOTA) feature extractors on KITTI and nuScenes datasets. Results show that APR outperforms all other extractors by a large margin, increasing average registration recall of SOTA extractors by 7.1% on LoKITTI and 4.6% on LoNuScenes. Code is available at https://github.com/liuQuan98/APR.

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Datasets


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Point Cloud Registration KITTI (Distant PCR) FCGF+APR(s) mRR @ Normal Criterion (1.5°&0.3m) 62.9 # 4
RR @ Loose Criterion (5°&2m), on LoKITTI 33.0 # 4
Point Cloud Registration KITTI (Distant PCR) Predator+APR(a) mRR @ Normal Criterion (1.5°&0.3m) 78.2 # 3
RR @ Loose Criterion (5°&2m), on LoKITTI 50.8 # 3
Point Cloud Registration nuScenes (Distant PCR) FCGF+APR(s) mRR @ Normal Criterion (1.5°&0.3m) 62.9 # 3
RR @ Loose Criterion (5°&2m), on LoNuScenes 51.8 # 4
Point Cloud Registration nuScenes (Distant PCR) Predator+APR(a) mRR @ Normal Criterion (1.5°&0.3m) 52.2 # 4
RR @ Loose Criterion (5°&2m), on LoNuScenes 62.7 # 3

Methods