Low-Overlap Registration of Multi-Source LiDAR Point Clouds in Urban Scenes Through Dual-Stage Feature Pruning and Progressive Hierarchical Methods

With the rapid advancement in laser scanning technologies, the capability to collect massive volumes of data and richer detailed features has been significantly enhanced. However, the differential representation ability of multi-source point clouds in capturing intricate structures within complex scenes, combined with the computational burden imposed by large datasets, presents substantial challenges to current registration methods. The proposed method encompasses two innovative feature point pruning techniques and two closely interconnected progressive processes. First, it identifies structural points that effectively represent the features of the scene and performs a rapid initial alignment of point clouds within the two-dimensional plane. Subsequently, it establishes the mapping relationship between the point clouds to be matched utilizing FPFH descriptors, followed by further screening to extract the maximum consensus set composed of points that meet constraints based on the intensity of graph nodes. Then, it integrates the processes of feature point description and similarity measurement to achieve precise point cloud registration. The proposed method effectively extracts matching primitives from large datasets, addressing issues related to false matches and noise in complex data environments. It has demonstrated favorable matching results even in scenarios with low overlap between datasets. On two public datasets and a self-constructed dataset, the method achieves an effective point set screening rate of approximately 1‰. On the WHU-TLS dataset, our method achieves a registration accuracy characterized by a rotation precision of 0.062° and a translation precision of 0.027 m, representing improvements of 70% and 80%, respectively, over current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The results obtained from real registration tasks demonstrate that our approach attains competitive registration accuracy when compared with existing SOTA techniques.