A weighted local‐spherical grid based lightweight descriptor for 3D point cloud registration

Establishing effective feature descriptors is a crucial step in 3D point cloud registration task. Existing manual‐based methods are noise‐susceptible and time‐consuming when running on low‐cost edge computing devices. To this end, the authors proposed a Local Reference Frame (LRF) based approach that can quickly and robustly register point clouds by using a novel lightweight local‐spherical grid weighted descriptor (LSGWD). Firstly, the LRF of the proposed algorithm is established by the covariance matrix eigenvector of KeyPoint's spherical support set and the centroid vector's projection on its orthogonal plane. Then the spherical support is grided to 32 bins, and the 4D geometric features of each subset are constructed by the centroid moment and the cosine value of the angles between the centroid vector and axes of LRF. Secondly, to restrain the insufficient discriminative information presented in the purely geometric features, the Gaussian projection and gradient mapping are proposed to calculate the smooth density and the correlation of structural characteristics, which are obtained as the distribution information of each bin to weigh the feature representation. Finally, the 32 × 4‐dimensional KeyPoint descriptor is obtained and used in the 3D point cloud registration framework. Experiments are carried out on three test datasets and real scene data. Compared to previous baselines, our descriptor achieves the state‐of‐the‐art performance in terms of efficiency and accuracy owing to its compact structure and noise robustness. The proposed method enhances the recognition and registration performance of 3D point cloud matching in low‐cost edge computing applications.