BO-ICP: Initialization of Iterative Closest Point Based on Bayesian Optimization
This addresses the need for reliable initialization in ICP-based registration, which is crucial for applications like offline map building, though it is an incremental improvement focusing on a specific bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of point cloud registration by proposing a Bayesian optimization method to find a good initial transform for Iterative Closest Point (ICP), showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods given similar computation time.
Typical algorithms for point cloud registration such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP) require a favorable initial transform estimate between two point clouds in order to perform a successful registration. State-of-the-art methods for choosing this starting condition rely on stochastic sampling or global optimization techniques such as branch and bound. In this work, we present a new method based on Bayesian optimization for finding the critical initial ICP transform. We provide three different configurations for our method which highlights the versatility of the algorithm to both find rapid results and refine them in situations where more runtime is available such as offline map building. Experiments are run on popular data sets and we show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods when given similar computation time. Furthermore, it is compatible with other improvements to ICP, as it focuses solely on the selection of an initial transform, a starting point for all ICP-based methods.