text: Topographic mapping in planetary environments relies on accurate 3D scan registration methods. However, most global registration algorithms relying on features such as FPFH and Harris-3D show poor alignment accuracy in these settings due to the poor structure of the Mars-like terrain and variable resolution, occluded, sparse range data that is hard to register without some a-priori knowledge of the environment. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to 3D scan registration using the curvelet transform that performs multi-resolution geometric analysis to obtain a set of coefficients indexed by scale (coarsest to finest), angle and spatial position. Features are detected in the curvelet domain to take advantage of the directional selectivity of the transform. A descriptor is computed for each feature by calculating the 3D spatial histogram of the image gradients, and nearest neighbor based matching is used to calculate the feature correspondences. Correspondence rejection using Random Sample Consensus identifies inliers, and a locally optimal Singular Value Decomposition-based estimation of the rigid-body transformation aligns the laser scans given the re-projected correspondences in the metric space. Experimental results on a publicly available data-set of planetary analogue indoor facility, as well as simulated and real-world scans from Neptec Design Group's IVIGMS 3D laser rangefinder at the outdoor CSA Mars yard demonstrates improved performance over existing methods in the challenging sparse Mars-like terrain.
  @cite_26: This paper introduces an algorithm for the registration of rotated and translated volumes using the three-dimensional (3-D) pseudopolar Fourier transform, which accurately computes the Fourier transform of the registered volumes on a near-spherical 3-D domain without using interpolation. We propose a three-step procedure. The first step estimates the rotation axis. The second step computes the planar rotation relative to the rotation axis. The third step recovers the translational displacement. The rotation estimation is based on Euler's theorem, which allows one to represent a 3-D rotation as a planar rotation around a 3-D rotation axis. This axis is accurately recovered by the 3-D pseudopolar Fourier transform using radial integrations. The residual planar rotation is computed by an extension of the angular difference function to cylindrical motion. Experimental results show that the algorithm is accurate and robust to noise
  @cite_50: This work introduces an original method for registering pairs of 3D views consisting of range data sets which operates in the frequency domain. The Fourier transform allows the decoupling of the estimate of the rotation parameters from the estimate of the translation parameters, our algorithm exploits this well-known property by suggesting a three-step procedure. The rotation parameters are estimated by the first two steps through convenient representations and projections of the Fourier transforms' magnitudes and the translational displacement is recovered by the third step by means of a standard phase correlation technique after compensating one of the two views for rotation. The performance of the algorithm, which is well-suited for unsupervised registration, is clearly assessed through extensive testing with several objects and shows that good and robust estimates of 3D rigid motion are achievable. Our algorithm can be used as a prealignment tool for more accurate space-domain registration techniques, like the ICP algorithm.
  @cite_17: We present Spectral Registration with Multilayer Resampling (SRMR) as a 6 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) registration method for noisy 3D data with partial overlap. The algorithm is based on decoupling 3D rotation from 3D translation by a corresponding resampling process of the spectral magnitude of a 3D Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) calculation on discretized 3D range data. The registration of all 6DOF is then subsequently carried out with spectral registrations using Phase Only Matched Filtering (POMF). There are two main aspects for the fast and robust registration of Euler angles from spherical information in SRMR. First of all, there is the permanent use of phase matching. Second, based on the FFT on a discrete Cartesian grid, not only one spherical layer but also a complete stack of layers are processed in one step. Experiments are presented with challenging datasets with respect to interference and overlap. The results include the fast and robust registration of artificially transformed data for ground-truth comparison, scans from the Stanford Bunny dataset, high end 3D laser range finder (LRF) scans of a city center, and range data from a low-cost actuated LRF in a disaster response scenario.
summary: Frequency-domain based approaches decouple the problem of finding rotation and translation transformation parameters and attempt to find a suitable registration in the transformed domain @cite_17 @cite_50 @cite_26 . Phase correlation is typically employed for matching which is robust to the effects of noise and occlusions, while fast Fourier transforms (FFT) used to compute cross-correlations makes this approach computationally efficient. However, the Fourier transform can only retrieve the global frequency content of the signal and provides a dense representation of the underlying signal.