A New Approach toward Corner Detection for Use in Point Cloud Registration

For this study, a new point cloud alignment method is proposed for extracting corner points and aligning them at the geometric level. It can align point clouds that have low overlap and is more robust to outliers and noise. First, planes are extracted from the raw point cloud, and the corner points are defined as the intersection of three planes. Next, graphs are constructed for subsequent point cloud registration by treating corners as vertices and sharing planes as edges. The graph-matching algorithm is then applied to determine correspondence. Finally, point clouds are registered by aligning the corresponding corner points. The proposed method was investigated by utilizing pertinent metrics on datasets with differing overlap. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can align point clouds that have low overlap, yielding an RMSE of about 0.05 cm for datasets with 90% overlap and about 0.2 cm when there is only about 10% overlap. In this situation, the other methods failed to align point clouds. In terms of time consumption, the proposed method can process a point cloud comprising 104 points in 4 s when there is high overlap. When there is low overlap, it can also process a point cloud comprising 106 points in 10 s. The contributions of this study are the definition and extraction of corner points at the geometric level, followed by the use of these corner points to register point clouds. This approach can be directly used for low-precision applications and, in addition, for coarse registration in high-precision applications.