Robust and fast 3-D scan registration using normal distributions transform with supervoxel segmentation

SUMMARYThis paper presents what is termed as the supervoxel normal distributions transform (SV-NDT), a novel three-dimensional (3-D) registration algorithm which improves the performance of the three-dimensional normal distributions transform (3-D NDT) significantly. The 3-D NDT partitions a model scan using a 3-D regular grid. Generating normal distributions using the 3-D regular grid causes considerable information loss because the 3-D regular grid does not use any information pertaining to the local surface structures of the model scan. The best type of surface (the constituent unit of each scan) for modeling with one normal distribution is known to be the plane. The SV-NDT reduces the loss of information using a supervoxel-generating algorithm at the partitioning stage. In addition, it uses the information of the local surface structures from the data scan by replacing the Euclidean distance with a function that uses local geometries as well as the Euclidean distance when each point in the data scan is matched to the corresponding normal distribution. Experiments demonstrate that the use of the supervoxel-generating algorithm increases the modeling accuracy of the normal distributions and that the proposed 3-D registration algorithm outperforms the 3-D NDT and other widely used 3-D registration algorithms in terms of robustness and speed on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Additionally, the effect of changing the function to create correspondences is also verified.