Robust Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration in a Full Range

Point cloud registration for 3D objects is a challenging task due to sparse and noisy measurements, incomplete observations and large transformations. In this work, we propose \textbf{G}raph \textbf{M}atching \textbf{C}onsensus \textbf{Net}work (\textbf{GMCNet}), which estimates pose-invariant correspondences for full-range Partial-to-Partial point cloud Registration (PPR) in the object-level registration scenario. To encode robust point descriptors, \textbf{1)} we first comprehensively investigate transformation-robustness and noise-resilience of various geometric features. \textbf{2)} Then, we employ a novel {T}ransformation-robust {P}oint {T}ransformer (\textbf{TPT}) module to adaptively aggregate local features regarding the structural relations, which takes advantage from both handcrafted rotation-invariant ({\textit{RI}}) features and noise-resilient spatial coordinates. \textbf{3)} Based on a synergy of hierarchical graph networks and graphical modeling, we propose the {H}ierarchical {G}raphical {M}odeling (\textbf{HGM}) architecture to encode robust descriptors consisting of i) a unary term learned from {\textit{RI}} features; and ii) multiple smoothness terms encoded from neighboring point relations at different scales through our TPT modules. Moreover, we construct a challenging PPR dataset (\textbf{MVP-RG}) based on the recent MVP dataset that features high-quality scans. Extensive experiments show that GMCNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for PPR. Notably, GMCNet encodes point descriptors for each point cloud individually without using cross-contextual information, or ground truth correspondences for training. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/paul007pl/GMCNet.