Todor Stoyanov, Martin Magnusson and Achim J. Lilienthal
Fast and Accurate Scan Registration through Minimization of the Distance between Compact 3D NDT Representations
Abstract:
Registration of range sensor measurements is an important task in mobile
robotics and has received a lot of attention. Several iterative optimization
schemes have been proposed in order to align three-dimensional point scans.
With the more widespread use of high-frame rate 3D sensors and increasingly
more challenging application scenarios for mobile robots, there is a need for
fast and accurate registration methods that current state of the art algorithms
cannot always meet. This work proposes a novel algorithm that achieves accurate
point cloud registration an order of a magnitude faster than the current state
of the art. The speedup is achieved through the use of a compact spatial
representation --- the Three-Dimensional Normal Distributions Transform
(3D-NDT). In addition, a fast, global-descriptor based on the 3D-NDT is defined
and used to achieve reliable initial poses for the iterative algorithm.
Finally, a closed form expression for the covariance of the proposed method is
also derived. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on two standard point cloud
data sets, resulting in stable performance on par with or better than the state
of the art. The implementation is available as an open-source package for the
Robot Operating System (ROS).
@ARTICLE{Stoyanov_etal:IJRR:2012,
AUTHOR = {Stoyanov, Todor and Magnusson, Martin and Lilienthal, Achim J.},
TITLE = {Fast and Accurate Scan Registration through Minimization of the Distance between Compact 3D NDT Representations},
JOURNAL = {The International Journal of Robotics Research},
VOLUME = {31},
ISSUE = {12},
PAGES = {1377-1393},
YEAR = {2012},
DOI = {10.1177/0278364912460895}
}