TEASER: Fast and Certifiable Point Cloud Registration

We propose the first fast and certifiable algorithm for the registration of two sets of three-dimensional (3-D) points in the presence of large amounts of outlier correspondences. A certifiable algorithm is one that attempts to solve an intractable optimization problem (e.g., robust estimation with outliers) and provides readily checkable conditions to verify if the returned solution is optimal (e.g., if the algorithm produced the most accurate estimate in the face of outliers) or bound its suboptimality or accuracy. Toward this goal, we first reformulate the registration problem using a truncated least squares (TLS) cost that makes the estimation insensitive to a large fraction of spurious correspondences.…