Low-Overlap Point Cloud Registration by Semiglobal Block Matching

In recent years, the local feature-based point cloud registration methods have attracted more attention for their high robustness. The state-of-the-art local feature-based pipeline consists of local feature extraction, feature matching, and outlier rejection. However, the accuracy of this pipeline decreases significantly between low-overlap point clouds. In this article, we propose a novel hand-crafted framework to realize efficient low-overlap point cloud registration through point cloud partitioning, semiglobal point cloud block matching, and best transformation selection with refinement. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm presents the superior performance over the previous methods on low-overlap scenes under different features and achieves very competitive accuracy on non-low-overlap data.