A Plug-and-Play Approach for Point Cloud Registration

Plug-and-play algorithms have shown impressive results on imaging inverse problems, such as registration, super-resolution, denoising and inpainting. These methods rely on a neural network denoiser to learn an implicit prior of the image to be estimated. This paper investigates a new plug-and-play approach for 3D point cloud registration, which is crucial for a wide range of applications such as urban planning, archaeology and autonomous vehicles. The 3D point cloud registration problem is formulated as an inverse problem whose unknowns are the image to be estimated and the transformation between the two point clouds. A plug-and-play approach using an alternating optimization strategy is proposed for solving the registration problem. Experiments conducted on synthetic data and LiDAR point clouds are presented showing the potential of the method.