Rigid Registration of Point Clouds Based on Partial Optimal Transport

Abstract

For rigid point cloud data registration, algorithms based on soft correspondences are more robust than the traditional ICP method and its variants. However, point clouds with severe outliers and missing data may lead to imprecise many‐to‐many correspondences and consequently inaccurate registration. In this study, we propose a point cloud registration algorithm based on partial optimal transport via a hard marginal constraint. The hard marginal constraint provides an explicit parameter to adjust the ratio of points that should be accurately matched, and helps avoid incorrect many‐to‐many correspondences. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state‐of‐the‐art registration results when dealing with point clouds with significant amount of outliers and missing points (see ).