Super 4PCS Fast Global Pointcloud Registration via Smart Indexing

Abstract Data acquisition in large‐scale scenes regularly involves accumulating information across multiple scans. A common approach is to locally align scan pairs using Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm (or its variants), but requires static scenes and small motion between scan pairs. This prevents accumulating data across multiple scan sessions and/or different acquisition modalities (e.g., stereo, depth scans). Alternatively, one can use a global registration algorithm allowing scans to be in arbitrary initial poses. The state‐of‐the‐art global registration algorithm, 4PCS, however has a quadratic time complexity in the number of data points. This vastly limits its applicability to acquisition of…