2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Acropolis Convention Center

Nice, France, Sept, 22-26, 2008

Aligning Point Cloud Views using Persistent Feature Histograms

Radu Bogdan Rusu, Nico Blodow, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Michael Beetz
Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Technische Universität München
{rusu,blodow,marton,beetz}@cs.tum.edu

Abstract— In this paper we investigate the usage of persistent for normal estimation on 3D point cloud data [10], [11]
point feature histograms for the problem of aligning point cloud as well as principal curvatures [12], [13], [14] on multiple
data views into a consistent global model. Given a collection of scales. Unfortunately, the above mentioned methods for com-
noisy point clouds, our algorithm estimates a set of robust 16D
features which describe the geometry of each point locally. By puting an optimal scale require additional thresholds, such
analyzing the persistence of the features at different scales, we as d1 and d2 which are determined empirically in [10], and
extract an optimal set which best characterizes a given point estimated using linear least-squares in [11] when knowledge
cloud. The resulted persistent features are used in an initial about ground truth normal exists. In [12] the neighborhood
alignment algorithm to estimate a rigid transformation that ap- is grown incrementally until a jump occurs in the variation-
proximately registers the input datasets. The algorithm provides
good starting points for iterative registration algorithms such scale curve, but the method cannot be successfully applied to
as ICP (Iterative Closest Point), by transforming the datasets to noisy point clouds, as the variations in the surface curvature
its convergence basin. We show that our approach is invariant are not modified smoothly with k. The selection of the
to pose and sampling density, and can cope well with noisy data Tc threshold in [13] is not intuitive, and the authors do
coming from both indoor and outdoor laser scans. not explain properly if the resulted persistent features are
obtained using solely the intersection of features computed
I. I NTRODUCTION
over different radii. The statistical estimation of curvatures
The problem of consistently aligning various 3D point in [14] uses a M-estimation framework to reject noise and
cloud data views into a complete model is known as registra- outliers in the data and samples normal variations in an
tion. Its goal is to find the relative positions and orientations adaptively reweighted neighborhood, but it is unfortunately
of the separately acquired views in a global coordinate slow for large datasets, requiring approximately 20 minutes
framework, such that the intersecting areas between them for about 106 points. Instead of attempting to match all
overlap perfectly. One of the most popular registration meth-
ods to date is the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm
[1], [2], an iterative descend method which tries to find the
optimal transformation between two datasets by minimizing
a distance error metric. ICP uses pairs of nearest 3D points
in the source and model set as correspondences, and assumes
that every point has a corresponding match.
Since input datasets do not always contain complete point-
to-point correspondences, due to the fact that they might
be only partially overlapping for example, a lot of efforts
have been made into the area of feature selection [3],
as well as including extra information such as colors [4],
intensity values [5], or normals [6] that could improve the
correspondence problem. Their values however, are highly
sensitive to sensor noise. More robust feature descriptors
such as moment invariants [7], spherical harmonic invariants
[8], and integral volume descriptors [9] have been proposed
as point features and used for registering partial scans of a
model [3], [9]. All of them are invariant to translation and
3D rotations, but are still sensitive to noise. Fig. 1. Feature Histograms for corresponding points on different point
cloud datasets.
All the above point descriptors are computed on their k-
neighborhood supports and in general it is not clear how
one should select an optimal k value. If the data is highly points, as this requires an exhaustive search through the cor-
contaminated with noise, selecting a small k will lead to respondence space, several variants that address the problem
large errors in the feature estimation. However, if k is too of its computational complexity have been proposed [15],
big, small details will be suppressed. Recently, work has been [16]. Including additional semantic information (e.g. walls,
done on automatically computing good k values (i.e. scale) floors, ceilings), as presented in [17] seems to decrease the

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 computation time by up to 30%. To improve the chances
of finding the global minimum, and thus improving ICP’s
narrow convergence basin, several alternative optimization
methods have been proposed [18], [19], though they require
that the individual point cloud data views are already roughly
aligned with each other.
Our work is motivated by finding correct point-to-point
correspondences in real-world noisy data scans, and com-
puting rigid transformations that roughly align them using
geometric constraints. This must serve as a good initial guess
for fine tuning the registration using algorithms such as ICP.
Our algorithm is based upon the previously mentioned work,
but adds several extensions. In the following we will discuss
our reasons and justify the need for these extensions.
While feature candidates such as estimated surface cur-
vatures [6] or integral volume descriptors [9] have already
been used as features for finding better matches in the point-
to-point correspondence process, these only represent their
point neighborhoods partially, and are dependent on noise
levels or point cloud density most of the times. We propose
the use of a better system that combines several aspects of the
geometry of a point’s neighborhood [20], [21] for estimating
a multi-value feature set (see Figure 1) and make an in-depth
analysis of the points’ histogram signatures for different
geometric primitives (i.e. plane, sphere, cylinder, and edge).
To select those features which best characterize the input
dataset, we perform a statistical feature analysis over multiple
scales and select a set of unique features present in more
of them. The persistence of a feature point is analyzed by Fig. 2. Aligning 2 scans of a kitchen using persistent feature histograms:
corresponding points (top), and computed initial alignment (middle). The
discretely sampling over an interval of sphere radii. We final result after registration for a sequence of 5 scans is shown at the
statistically analyze different distance metrics between each bottom.
point’s histogram signature and the mean histogram of the
cloud (µ-histogram), and select the points outside the µ±α·σ
interval as unique features (see Section III). ent scans (acquired from different scanning poses and
Using the computed features descriptors, our goal is to with different densities), and
match the correspondent ones in order to produce a good • expressive enough (because of their higher dimension-
initial guess for ICP. Similar systems have already been ality) to produce correct correspondences.
proposed such as in [22], where a rough initial guess is Together with a geometrical reasoning method, these form
computed using Extended Gaussian Images (EGI) and the the basis of a good initial alignment for registration.
rotational Fourier transform. Extended Gaussian Images are As it can be seen in Figure 2, using the identified point
useful for representing the shapes of surfaces and can be correspondences (based on our persistent point feature his-
approximated using the spherical histogram of surface orien- tograms) the initial alignment is able to produce an almost
tations. While this can provide good transformations which perfect alignment for the two kitchen scans.
might align two datasets closely for watertight objects, it The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
does not produce satisfactory results for our environmental The next section (Section II) introduces the point feature
models, as the normals alone do not provide enough infor- histograms and presents the implementation of our algorithm
mation about the geometry of the cloud. Our work is based for computing them. Section III describes the theory behind
on the idea that relationships between persistent features in the feature persistence analysis and gives an example for
a scene can lead to potentially better alignment candidates. two different datasets. Section IV explains our registration
Therefore we assemble pairs of histogram-features in the first algorithm using geometrical reasoning for finding good ini-
point cloud and check for corresponding pairs (points with tial alignments. We discuss experimental results in section V
similar histograms and distances to each other) in the second and conclude in section VI.
one, similar to [9].
Our key contribution is the application of a feature lan- II. P OINT F EATURE H ISTOGRAMS
guage which describes important points in a dataset with the A problem that arises in point-to-point correspondence
advantage that these features are: searches, is that the features usually used (e.g. surface nor-
• persistent, i.e. similar for corresponding points in differ- mals and curvature estimates [6], integral volume descriptors

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 [9], etc) do not fully represent the underlying surface on
which the point’s k-neighborhood is positioned. Moreover,
these kinds of features approximate the neighborhood with a
single scalar value. As a direct consequence, most scenes will
contain many points with the same or very similar feature
values, thus reducing their informative characteristics. Even
if the feature estimation would be able to cope with noisy
datasets, it can still be easily deduced that applications who
rely on these one dimensional features will deal with multiple
and false correspondences and will be prone to failure.
Ideally, for each point in the dataset we would like to
have informative labels as features, such as: point lying on
an edge, point lying on a sphere or a plane, and so on. Using
such features and sets of geometric constraints between them,
the probability of finding the correct correspondences in
other datasets would increase. Fig. 3. The computed Darboux frame (vectors u, v and w) placed at the
In order to efficiently obtain such informative features, we source point.
propose the computation and usage of a histogram of values
[20], [23] which encodes the neighborhood’s geometrical
properties much better, and provides an overall scale and In the k-neighborhood around point p, for each pair of
pose invariant multi-value feature. The histogram generalizes points pi and pj a source is uniquely defined. By imple-
the mean surface curvature at a point p, and is computed as: menting these restrictions (i.e. i 6= j and j < i), the
• for each point p, all of p’s neighbors enclosed in computational complexity for each point can be changed
the sphere with a given radius r are selected (k- from the theoretical O(k 2 ) to O(k·(k−1)/2).
neighborhood); The four features are categorized using a 16-bin histogram,
• if the surface normal at point p is missing, approximate where each bin at index idx contains the percentage of the
it by the normal of the best fit plane to the neighborhood source points in the neighborhood which have their features
surface – usually performed using Principal Component in the interval defined by idx:
Analysis:
f1 = hv, nt i

npi = V0 , λ0 ≤ λ1 ≤ λ2 
i≤4

f2 = ||pt − ps ||

where V0 is the eigenvector corresponding to the small-  X
idx = step(si , fi ) · 2i−1
est eigenvalue λ0 ; f3 = hu, pt − ps i/f2 
 i=1
• once all normals are obtained, use the existing viewpoint f4 = atan(hw, nt i, hu, nt i)


information to re-orient them all consistently1 : (3)
where step(s, f ) is defined as 0 if f < s and 1 otherwise.
hv − pi , npi i
if < 0, then npi = −npi (1) This means that by setting si to the center of the definition
kv − pi k interval of fi (i.e. 0 for features f1 , f3 , f4 and r for f2 )
where npi is the normal of the point pi and, v is the the algorithm classifies each feature of a {pi ,pj } pair in p’s
viewpoint; vicinity in two categories, and saves the percentage of pairs
• for every pair of points pi and pj (i 6= j, j < i) in which have the same category for all four features.
the k-neighborhood of p, and their estimated normals The four features are a measure of the angles between
ni and nj , we select a source ps and target pt point the points’ normals and the distance vector between them.
– the source being the one having the smaller angle Because f1 and f3 are dot products between normalized
between the associated normal and the line connecting vectors, they are in fact the cosine of the angles between
the points: the 3D vectors, thus their value is between ±1. Similarly, f4
if hni , pj − pi i ≤ hnj , pi − pj i is the angle that nt forms with u if projected on the plane
then ps = pi , pt = pj defined by u = nt and w, so its value is between ±π.
else ps = pj , pt = pi The number of histogram bins that can be formed using
these four geometric features is div 4 , where div is the
and then define the Darboux frame (see Figure 3) with
number of subdivisions of the features’ value range. In our
the origin in the source point as:
implementation, by dividing the feature values in two parts
(fi smaller or greater than si ), we obtain a total of 24 = 16
u = ns , v = (pt − ps ) × u, w = u × v. (2) bins as the total number of combinations between the four
features. Because the number of bins increases exponentially
1 see [24] for a general algorithm for consistent normal orientation by the power of 4 (e.g. 34 = 81), we want to keep div as low
propagation for 3D objects as possible, and setting it to 2 already gives good results.

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 Figure 4 illustrates the differences using our proposed 16D By comparing the feature histogram of each point against
feature set between query points located on various geomet- the µ-histogram using a distance metric (see below), and
ric surfaces. The surfaces were synthetically generated to building a distribution of distances (see Figure 8 – note that
have similar scales, densities, and noise levels as our input it can be approximated with a Gaussian distribution) , we can
real-world datasets. For each of the mentioned surfaces, a perform a statistical analysis of each feature’s persistence
point was selected such that it lies: (i) on the middle of an over multiple radii. More specifically, we select the set of
edge of a cube, (ii) on the lateral surface of a cylinder at points (Pfi ) whose feature distances are outside the interval
half the height, (iii) on a sphere, and (iv) on a plane. The µ ± α · σ, as unique features. We do this for every r and
16D feature histogram was generated using all its neighbors at the end, select the unique features which are persistent in
inside a sphere with radius r = 2cm. The results show that both ri and ri+1 , that is:
the different geometrical properties of each surface produce n−1
unique signatures in the feature histograms space.
[
Pf = [Pfi ∩ Pfi+1 ] (4)
i=1

As most of the points in the kitchen scene were located

on planes, their histograms were similar (and closer to the
mean shown in Figure 7) thus producing a sharp peak in the
distance distribution. This not that accentuated in the outdoor
scans, where there are significantly less planar regions.
For our examples we fixed the value of α to 1, as only
around 10 − 20% of the points are outside the µ ± σ interval,
thus selecting them as unique in the respective radius.
For matching the point feature histograms with the µ-
histogram of the cloud, we have performed an in-depth anal-
ysis using various distance metrics from literature, similar
to [23], [25]. Our results confirmed the findings in [25],
Fig. 4. Feature Histograms for query points located on different synthetic where the Kullback-Leibler distance (divergence) gave good
geometric surfaces with the color coded Kullback-Leibler distances. results for computing differences between the histograms. Its
formula is given below:
The f4 feature roughly describes the angle between ns
16
and nt ; its value is 0 if the angle is outside ±π/2 and 1
(pfi − µi ) · ln(pi /µi )
X f
otherwise. Thus in Figure 4 f4 ’s value is usualy 1, but in KL divergence = (5)
i=1
complex scenes it also takes the value 0 (see Figure 1).
The effect of increased noise was analyzed in [21] and we where the symbols pfi and µi represent the point feature
found that points produce similar histograms consistently. histogram at bin i and the mean histogram of the entire
dataset at bin i respectively.
III. P ERSISTENCE A NALYSIS
Figure 5 and 6 present the results of the persistence feature
When using point features as characteristics of the entire analysis for two different datasets: one indoor kitchen envi-
point cloud, it’s good to make sure that we find a compact ronment (Figure 5) and one outdoor urban scene (Figure 6).
subset of points Pf that best represents the point cloud. The values of the ri radii set are selected based on
The lesser the number of feature points and the better they dimensionality of the features that need to be detected. As
characterize the data, the more efficient are the subsequent the point clouds are obtained directly from laser sensors by
interpretation process. However, choosing the subset Pf is scanning the environment, the scale is known so the radii
not easy, as it relies on a double dependency: both the rmin,max of a sphere can be chosen intuitively. Based on the
number of neighbors k and the point cloud density ϕ. sensor’s resolution, the neighborhood can contain anything
Our feature persistence analysis computes the subset of from a few points to thousands or even more.
points Pf , that minimizes the number of points considered Figure 7 presents the the mean µ-histogram of the kitchen
for further analysis from the input data set. Corresponding dataset for each separate radius. By comparing the results
points in different views will be likely to be found as with the ones presented in Figure 4, we determined that the
persistent features in both scans, which helps in registration given input scan is mostly composed out of planar regions,
but also for segmenting similar points into regions. as its most frequent geometric primitive.
In order to select the best feature points for a given cloud,
we analyze the neighborhood of each point p multiple times, IV. E STIMATING G OOD A LIGNMENTS
by enclosing p on a sphere of radius ri and p as its center. The registration problem becomes easily solvable if the
We vary r over an interval depending on the point cloud size point to point correspondences are perfectly known in both
and density, and compute the local point feature histograms datasets. However, that is not the case in registration prob-
for every point. We then select all the points in the cloud, and lems where no artificial markers are used, so it is essential
compute the mean of the feature distribution (µ-histogram). to robustly estimate good correspondences. Thus, the first

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 Analyzing feature persistence for different radii
radius1 = 2.0cm
radius2 = 2.5cm
radius3 = 3.0cm
KL distance value for a given radius

2 radius4 = 3.5cm
µ+/-σ for r1
µ+/-σ for r2
µ+/-σ for r3
µ+/-σ for r4
1.5

Analyzing feature persistence for different radii

1.6
radius1 = 0.50m
1 radius2 = 0.75m
radius3 = 1.00m

KL distance value for a given radius

1.4 radius4 = 1.25m
radius5 = 1.50m
µ+/-σ for r1
1.2 µ+/-σ for r2
0.5 µ+/-σ for r3
µ+/-σ for r4
µ+/-σ for r5
1

0 0.8

3300 3350 3400 3450 3500 0.6

Point index
Analyzing feature persistence for different radii 0.4

radius1 = 2.0cm
radius2 = 2.5cm 0.2
radius3 = 3.0cm
KL distance value for a given radius

2 radius4 = 3.5cm
µ+/-σ for r1
µ+/-σ for r2 0
µ+/-σ for r3
µ+/-σ for r4
102080 102100 102120 102140 102160 102180 102200 102220
1.5
Point index
Analyzing feature persistence for different radii
1.6
radius1 = 0.50m
1 radius2 = 0.75m
radius3 = 1.00m
KL distance value for a given radius

1.4 radius4 = 1.25m

radius5 = 1.50m
µ+/-σ for r1
1.2 µ+/-σ for r2
0.5 µ+/-σ for r3
µ+/-σ for r4
µ+/-σ for r5
1

0 0.8

3300 3350 3400 3450 3500 0.6

Point index
0.4

Fig. 5. Analyzing the uniqueness and persistence of feature histograms for 0.2

an indoor kitchen scene. From top to bottom and left to right: (i) unique
0
features over multiple radii, color-coded in the same way as the plots;
(ii) global persistent features for the entire scene; (iii) Kullback-Leibler 102080 102100 102120 102140 102160 102180 102200 102220

divergence values between each point histogram and the mean µ-histogram Point index
of the cloud; and (iv) the remaining persistent features after selection.
Fig. 6. Analyzing the persistence of feature histograms for an outdoor
urban scene. Please see Figure 5 for explanations.
step of our registration module is to compute a good initial
alignment, and return a set of m correspondences that can
be used to directly transform the source point cloud into For computing distances in a 16D space, we construct a
the convergence area of the target. The method is similar kD-tree in the feature histograms space, and for a set of m
to [9], but instead of using Integral Volume Descriptors to persistent feature points in the source dataset we perform a
identify interesting feature points, we use our 16D feature k-nearest neighbor search in the target. Hence, we look at
histograms which yield better results for our datasets, as the k points with most similar histograms and keep them
shown in Figure 9. The computed correspondences must as correspondence candidates for pi . We call this set of
satisfy a geometric contraint based on the intrinsic, rotation correspondence candidates:
and position invariant properties of the point cloud. Point to C = {ci |ci = hpi , qi1 , qi2 , ..., qik i, 1 ≤ i ≤ m} (6)
point distances within the point cloud are a good candidate
since they are easy to compute and fulfill this requirement, In the second phase of the initial alignment, we hierarchically
so we identify a set of points pi that have the same distances merge the best entries ci , cj from C into a set of 2-point
to each other than their corresponding points qi . correspondences E2 . For every combination of pi and pj ,

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 Mean histograms for different radii KL−divergence Histogram:µ=0.1992, σ=0.3609
60
250000
Ratio of points in one bin (%) r1 = 2.0 cm
50 r2 = 2.5 cm
r3 = 3.0 cm 200000

Number of points in each bin

r4 = 3.5 cm
40

150000
30

20 100000

10
50000

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Bins 0
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
Kullback-Leibler values

Mean histograms for different radii

45 KL−divergence Histogram:µ=0.3920, σ=0.2340
Ratio of points in one bin (%)

20000
40
r1 = 0.50 m
35
r2 = 0.75 m
r3 = 1.00 m

Number of points in each bin

30 r4 = 1.25 m 15000
r5 = 1.50 m
25

20
10000
15

10

5000
5

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Bins 0
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
Kullback-Leibler values

Fig. 7. Mean feature histograms over different radii for the kitchen (top)
and outdoor (bottom) scenes.
Fig. 8. Distribution of the feature histograms’ distance from their mean (µ-
histogram) using the Kullback-Leibler metric for the indoor kitchen (top)
and outdoor (bottom) scan (see Figures 5 and 6). The histograms were
we find the qir and qjs that minimize ||pi − pj | − |qir − qjs || computed for r = 0.3cm and r = 1m respectively.
and add it to E2 , in increasing order.
We then proceed merging pairs of entries he2,i , e2,j i from function n
E2 if e2,i is the next entry that is not merged yet and e2,j X
kR · pi + T − qi k2 (8)
minimizes dRM S(P, Q), where P is the set of all points
i=1
pi ∈ e2,i ∪ e2,j , and Q the set of all points qi ∈ e2,i ∪ e2,j :
changes to
n
n n X
1 XX 2 k(R · pi + T − qi ) · nqi k, (9)
dRM S (P, Q) = 2 (kpi − pj k − kqi − qj k)2 , (7)
n i=1 j=1 i=1

where nqi is the normal to the surface in point qi .

analog to the construction of E2 . We continue merging This means we try to minimize the distance between a
entries from E2k into E2k+1 in this manner, until there are not point pi and the surface of its corresponding point qi , or
enough correspondences left in Ek (k = kmax ) to generate the distance along the normal of qi . Specifically, movement
2k-point correspondences. The result is a set of 2kmax points of the source point cloud tangentially to the target is not
in the source point cloud, each with a corresponding point restricted. This means faster convergence when the point
in the source model such that the point-to-point distances clouds are already close to each other, i.e. in the last iteration
within each of the two sets differ minimally. This 2kmax - steps (see Figure 10).
point correspondence can be used to construct a transforma-
tion (translation and rotation) that aligns these points This V. D ISCUSSIONS AND E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
transformation is applied to the source point cloud to roughly We conducted several experiments to evaluate our regis-
align it onto the target. tration method. Computing the initial alignment using our
After an initial alignment has been obtained, to improve feature histograms proved to be far superior to using other
convergence speed, the algorithm uses a different method features such as Integral Volume Descriptors (IVD) or sur-
to estimate the optimal transform than classical ICP using face curvature estimates, since it was able to robustly bring
all data points. We are using an alternative error function the point clouds close to the correct position independent of
that instead of minimizing the sum P of squares of distances their original poses (see Figure 9). We could only achieve
n
between corresponding points min i=1 dist(pi , qi ) , uses this using IVD when we considered at least k = 150 similar
an approximate measure of point-to-surface distances [26]. points in the target point cloud for every selected feature
Using the new distance measure, the classical ICP error point in the source, and even then there were cases where

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 it failed. Also, runtime increases exponentially in k, which rithm using the estimated persistent histogram features for
also renders the IVD method inferior. We discovered that 4 outdoor urban point cloud scans. The data was acquired
increasing the number of correspondent candidates (k) above using a Riegl Z420 3D laser sensor in Ljubljana, Slove-
10 did not improve the results. nia. The topmost part of the figure, presents a snapshot
of the correspondence search for two of the scans using
geometric constraints from the initial alignment step. Below,
the results of the alignment are shown after applying the
best transformation found, as well as the final results after
using ICP, followed by a close-up in intensity and curvature
domain. The last picture presents the overall registration
result for all four scans. The same algorithm was applied
for registering 5 scans of an indoor kitchen scene, as shown
in Figure 2. The data was acquired using a SICK LMS 400
sensor. Please note that both datasets used are raw noisy
scans with variable densities and have not been pre-processed
as presented in [20]. Moreover, while the kitchen dataset
has a few million points, the urban one is much sparser, in
the order of a few hundred thousand points. The variability
presented in the data was dealt with successfully using our
algorithm, with the only difference being that the larger
datasets require more memory and increased computational
Fig. 9. Two datasets before registration (top). Initial Alignment results us- costs.
ing Feature Histograms (bottom left) and using Integral Volume Descriptors To evaluate the peformance of our method, and more
(bottom right).
specifically its pose invariance, we transformed the datasets
In the second stage of registration, our variant of ICP using random rigid tranformations. The obtained registration
using instantaneous kinematics, converges faster to the cor- results were consistent each time, converging to the correct
rect solution than regular ICP. This is mostly due to the solution. With respect to time constraints, the most expensive
point-to-surface error metric which doesn’t restrict tangential component is represented by the feature histograms com-
movement, thus accelerating convergence when the point putation, with a theoretical complexity of O(k 2 ) (in our
clouds are already close to each other. Figure 10 presents the application we use the feature histograms for other things
registration errors for the previous two views of the kitchen besides registration, thus their costs are amortized). Once
dataset, after each iteration step, using the two ICP variants. the features are computed, they are checked for saliency and
The error units are degrees for the rotational error and only the persistent ones will be used in the initial alignment
meters for the translational error. Using histogram feature algorithm. The pairing of correspondent histograms can be
correspondences, Kinematic ICP was able to converge in 1- costly as well if too many persistent features are used, but
2 steps as opposed to at least 5 steps in Regular ICP, which this can also be dealt with by random sampling.
also converged to a slightly offset solution.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
We have presented a method for computing persistent
point feature histograms for the problem of correspondence
search in 3D point clouds. By using a higher dimensionality
(16D) for characterizing the local geometry at a point p, the
estimated features are robust in the presence of outliers, and
invariant to the position, orientation, or sampling density of
the cloud. In combination with an initial alignment algorithm
based on geometric constraints, partially overlapping datasets
can successfully be aligned within the convergence basin of
iterative registration methods such as ICP. To show their
effectiveness, we have applied the method to real-world
datasets coming from indoor and outdoor laser scans.
We plan to investigate the usage of feature histograms in
other spaces (e.g. colors) to improve registration in situations
where geometry informations does not suffice. Future work
Fig. 10. Comparison of the registration errors of Kinematic vs. Regular will also investigate the possibility of using a non-linear op-
ICP during each iteration step for the first two scans of the kitchen scene, timizer to obtain a global registration algorithm which could
both starting after our Initial Alignment.
align two datasets in one pass, first by transforming them
Figure 11 presents the results of our registration algo- closely with the initial alignment, and then fine-tuning the

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