Registration of point clouds based on the ratio of bidirectional distances

Despite the fact that original Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm has been widely used for registration, itcannot tackle the problem when two point clouds are par-tially overlapping. Accordingly, this paper proposes a ro-bust approach for the registration of partially overlappingpoint clouds. Given two initially posed clouds, it firstlybuilds up bilateral correspondence and computes bidirec-tional distances for each point in the data shape. Based onthe ratio of bidirectional distances, the exponential functionis selected and utilized to calculate the probability value,which can indicate whether the point pair belongs to theoverlapping part or not. Subsequently, the probability val-ue can be embedded into the least square function for reg-istration of partially overlapping point clouds and a novelvariant of ICP algorithm is presented to obtain the optimalrigid transformation. The proposed approach can achievegood registration of point clouds, even when their overlappercentage is low. Experimental results tested on public da-ta sets illustrate its superiority over previous approaches onrobustness.