Hiromasa Suzuki

Tatsuya Yatagawa, Yutaka Ohtake, Hiromasa Suzuki

Traditional algorithms of point set registration minimizing point-to-plane distances often achieve a better estimation of rigid transformation than those minimizing point-to-point distances. Nevertheless, recent deep-learning-based methods minimize the point-to-point distances. In contrast to these methods, this paper proposes the first deep-learning-based approach to point-to-plane registration. A challenging part of this problem is that a typical solution for point-to-plane registration requires an iterative process of accumulating small transformations obtained by minimizing a linearized energy function. The iteration significantly increases the size of the computation graph needed for backpropagation and can slow down both forward and backward network evaluations. To solve this problem, we consider the estimated rigid transformation as a function of input point clouds and derive its analytic gradients using the implicit function theorem. The analytic gradient that we introduce is independent of how the error minimizing function (i.e., the rigid transformation) is obtained, thus allowing us to calculate both the rigid transformation and its gradient efficiently. We implement the proposed point-to-plane registration module over several previous methods that minimize point-to-point distances and demonstrate that the extensions outperform the base methods even with point clouds with noise and low-quality point normals estimated with local point distributions.

Mizuki Kikkawa, Tatsuya Yatagawa, Yutaka Ohtake et al.

This study investigates the impact of the invariance of feature vectors for partial-to-partial point set registration under translation and rotation of input point sets, particularly in the realm of techniques based on deep learning and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We reveal both theoretical and practical problems associated with such deep-learning-based registration methods using GMMs, with a particular focus on the limitations of DeepGMR, a pioneering study in this line, to the partial-to-partial point set registration. Our primary goal is to uncover the causes behind such methods and propose a comprehensible solution for that. To address this, we introduce an attention-based reference point shifting (ARPS) layer, which robustly identifies a common reference point of two partial point sets, thereby acquiring transformation-invariant features. The ARPS layer employs a well-studied attention module to find a common reference point rather than the overlap region. Owing to this, it significantly enhances the performance of DeepGMR and its recent variant, UGMMReg. Furthermore, these extension models outperform even prior deep learning methods using attention blocks and Transformer to extract the overlap region or common reference points. We believe these findings provide deeper insights into registration methods using deep learning and GMMs.