ReAgent: Point Cloud Registration using Imitation and Reinforcement Learning
This addresses robust and generalizable registration for 3D computer vision tasks, offering incremental improvements over prior learning-based methods.
The paper tackles point cloud registration by framing it as a reinforcement learning task, proposing ReAgent, which achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on datasets like ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN and outperforms existing methods in object pose estimation on LINEMOD.
Point cloud registration is a common step in many 3D computer vision tasks such as object pose estimation, where a 3D model is aligned to an observation. Classical registration methods generalize well to novel domains but fail when given a noisy observation or a bad initialization. Learning-based methods, in contrast, are more robust but lack in generalization capacity. We propose to consider iterative point cloud registration as a reinforcement learning task and, to this end, present a novel registration agent (ReAgent). We employ imitation learning to initialize its discrete registration policy based on a steady expert policy. Integration with policy optimization, based on our proposed alignment reward, further improves the agent's registration performance. We compare our approach to classical and learning-based registration methods on both ModelNet40 (synthetic) and ScanObjectNN (real data) and show that our ReAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. The lightweight architecture of the agent, moreover, enables reduced inference time as compared to related approaches. In addition, we apply our method to the object pose estimation task on real data (LINEMOD), outperforming state-of-the-art pose refinement approaches.