Improved extended Gaussian image and its application on 3D point clouds registration

Abstract

To solve the problem of lacking geometric and topological information for conventional 3D point clouds registration algorithm, this paper proposed a novel 3D point clouds registration algorithm based on improved extended Gaussian image. The proposed registration algorithm first estimates a normal vector and curvature of every point by least square method. Then, according to the normal vector to calculate extended Gaussian image (EGI) and complex extended Gaussian image (CEGI). By using the calculated EGI/CEGI and spherical harmonic function, a correlated function is constructed to calculate 3D rotation space to obtain initial positions coarse registration result. At last, by using the Fourier transform to estimate translation vector and coarse registration, the iterative closest point algorithm is used to obtain the fine registration results. Experiments on three groups of different 3D point clouds are performed to validate the proposed registration algorithm. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm has good performances on registration of different forms of 3D point clouds. The robustness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm can effectively solve the problem that it is difficult to find the target or the homonymic feature points in the registration process of 3D point clouds.