GlobalPointer: Large-Scale Plane Adjustment with Bi-Convex Relaxation
This work addresses a challenging problem in multi-view point cloud registration for 3D applications, offering a more efficient and robust solution.
The paper tackles the plane adjustment problem in 3D applications by proposing GlobalPointer and GlobalPointer++ algorithms, which achieve large-scale processing with linear time complexity, a larger convergence region, and robustness to poor initialization while maintaining similar accuracy to prior methods.
Plane adjustment (PA) is crucial for many 3D applications, involving simultaneous pose estimation and plane recovery. Despite recent advancements, it remains a challenging problem in the realm of multi-view point cloud registration. Current state-of-the-art methods can achieve globally optimal convergence only with good initialization. Furthermore, their high time complexity renders them impractical for large-scale problems. To address these challenges, we first exploit a novel optimization strategy termed \textit{Bi-Convex Relaxation}, which decouples the original problem into two simpler sub-problems, reformulates each sub-problem using a convex relaxation technique, and alternately solves each one until the original problem converges. Building on this strategy, we propose two algorithmic variants for solving the plane adjustment problem, namely \textit{GlobalPointer} and \textit{GlobalPointer++}, based on point-to-plane and plane-to-plane errors, respectively. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method can perform large-scale plane adjustment with linear time complexity, larger convergence region, and robustness to poor initialization, while achieving similar accuracy as prior methods. The code is available at https://github.com/wu-cvgl/GlobalPointer.