text: This paper presents a mutual information (MI) based algorithm for the estimation of full 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid body transformation between two overlapping point clouds. We first divide the scene into a 3D voxel grid and define simple to compute features for each voxel in the scan. The two scans that need to be aligned are considered as a collection of these features and the MI between these voxelized features is maximized to obtain the correct alignment of scans. We have implemented our method with various simple point cloud features (such as number of points in voxel, variance of z-height in voxel) and compared the performance of the proposed method with existing point-to-point and point-to-distribution registration methods. We show that our approach has an efficient and fast parallel implementation on GPU, and evaluate the robustness and speed of the proposed algorithm on two real-world datasets which have variety of dynamic scenes from different environments.
  @cite_14: This thesis describes a scalable robotic navigation system that builds a map of the robot's environment on the fly. This problem is also known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The SLAM problem has as inputs the control of the robot's motion and sensor measurements to features in the environment. The desired output is the path traversed by the robot (localization) and a representation of the sensed environment (mapping). The principal contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a framework, termed Atlas, that alleviates the computational restrictions of previous approaches to SLAM when mapping extended environments. The Atlas framework partitions the SLAM problem into a graph of submaps, each with its own coordinate system. Furthermore, the framework facilitates the modularity of sensors, map representations, and local navigation algorithms by encapsulating the implementation specific algorithms module that matches submaps and a verification procedure that trades latency in loop closing with a lower chance of incorrect loop detections inherent with symmetric environments. The framework is demonstrated with several datasets that map large indoor and urban outdoor environments using a variety of sensors: a laser scanner, sonar rangers, and omni-directional video. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
  @cite_26: The authors describe a general-purpose, representation-independent method for the accurate and computationally efficient registration of 3-D shapes including free-form curves and surfaces. The method handles the full six degrees of freedom and is based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, which requires only a procedure to find the closest point on a geometric entity to a given point. The ICP algorithm always converges monotonically to the nearest local minimum of a mean-square distance metric, and the rate of convergence is rapid during the first few iterations. Therefore, given an adequate set of initial rotations and translations for a particular class of objects with a certain level of 'shape complexity', one can globally minimize the mean-square distance metric over all six degrees of freedom by testing each initial registration. One important application of this method is to register sensed data from unfixtured rigid objects with an ideal geometric model, prior to shape inspection. Experimental results show the capabilities of the registration algorithm on point sets, curves, and surfaces. >
  @cite_9: A mobile robot exploring an unknown environment has no absolute frame of reference for its position, other than features it detects through its sensors. Using distinguishable landmarks is one possible approach, but it requires solving the object recognition problem. In particular, when the robot uses two-dimensional laser range scans for localization, it is difficult to accurately detect and localize landmarks in the environment (such as corners and occlusions) from the range scans. In this paper, we develop two new iterative algorithms to register a range scan to a previous scan so as to compute relative robot positions in an unknown environment, that avoid the above problems. The first algorithm is based on matching data points with tangent directions in two scans and minimizing a distance function in order to solve the displacement between the scans. The second algorithm establishes correspondences between points in the two scans and then solves the point-to-point least-squares problem to compute the relative pose of the two scans. Our methods work in curved environments and can handle partial occlusions by rejecting outliers.
  @cite_21: A method is presented that uses an approximate nearest neighbor method for determining correspondences within the iterative closest point algorithm. The method is based upon the k-d tree. The standard k-d tree uses a tentative backtracking search to identify nearest neighbors. In contrast, the approximate k-d tree (Ak-d tree) applies a depth-first nontentative search to the k-d tree structure. This search improves runtime efficiency, with the tradeoff of reducing the accuracy of the determined correspondences. This approximate search is applied to early iterations of the iterative closest point algorithm, transitioning to the standard k-d tree for the final iterations after the change in the mean square error of the correspondences becomes sufficiently small. The method benefits both from the improved time performance of the approximate search in early iterations as well as the full accuracy of the complete search in later iterations. Experimental results indicate that the time efficiency of Ak-d tree is superior to the k-d tree and Elias for moderately large point sets. The change in the shape of the minimum potential well space is subtle, and the convergence properties are often identical. In those cases where the global minimum was not achieved, the difference in final mse was very small. In one trial, Ak-d tree converged faster to a better minimum with a smaller mse, which indicates that the use of approximate methods may be beneficial in the presence of outliers.
  @cite_1: 
  @cite_2: This paper describes PLICP, an ICP (iterative closest corresponding point) variant that uses a point-to-line metric, and an exact closed-form for minimizing such metric. The resulting algorithm has some interesting properties: it converges quadratically, and in a finite number of steps. The method is validated against vanilla ICP, IDC (iterative dual correspondences), and MBICP (Metric-Based ICP) by reproducing the experiments performed in (2006). The experiments suggest that PLICP is more precise, and requires less iterations. However, it is less robust to very large initial displacement errors. The last part of the paper is devoted to purely algorithmic optimization of the correspondence search; this allows for a significant speed-up of the computation. The source code is available for download.
  @cite_12: 
summary: Iterative Closest Point (ICP) @cite_26 is one of the most popular scan registration algorithms used to estimate the optimal transformation between two overlapping scans. In ICP, closest points between scan @math and reference scan @math are used to obtain a closed-form solution by optimizing the sum of squared distances (usually Euclidean distance). Performing the nearest neighbor search in ICP becomes a bottleneck due to its high computational cost, however, using a K-D Tree @cite_21 does mitigate the problem to an extent. Iterative Dual Correspondence (IDC) @cite_9 generates corresponding points for both rotation and translation separately, with optimization done in an alternate fashion. This improves the alignment accuracy when the initial estimate has large rotational error. Iterative Closest Line (ICL) @cite_14 , @cite_12 , @cite_2 is a variant of ICP in which instead of matching the points in both the scans, the query points in scan @math are matched to lines extracted from points in reference scan @math . Generalized ICP (GICP) @cite_1 , attaches a probabilistic model in estimating the correct corresponding points by taking the covariance structure derived from the local neighborhood in the environment.