GeoRescue: A Geometric LiDAR Point Cloud Registration Framework for Resource-Constrained Edge Platforms

Accurate LiDAR point cloud registration on resource-constrained edge platforms is a prerequisite for intelligent robotics and industrial automation, yet it remains challenging because low-overlap matching, false correspondences, and fine alignment must be handled under limited computing budgets without GPU acceleration. While learning-based methods have advanced the field, their heavy hardware dependency and training requirements often hinder their practical deployment on mobile edge devices. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes GeoRescue, a training-free geometric registration framework designed for high-precision perception under stringent hardware limits. The method consists of three modular stages: Asymmetric Correspondence Expansion (ACE), which enlarges the candidate correspondence set to reduce the loss of true matches; Dynamic Geometric Topology Gating (DGTG), which suppresses false matches through distance-consistency-based hypothesis filtering; and Uncertainty-Aware Manifold Refinement (UAMR), which improves fine alignment by explicitly modeling local anisotropic noise via covariance-guided optimization. Experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, and KITTI show that GeoRescue achieves registration recall rates of 84.84% and 41.27%, respectively, and a 94.95% success rate on KITTI. Remarkably, the framework matches the accuracy of high-capacity learning models while running on a GPU-free, 15 W edge CPU platform (Intel Core i5-8265U). These results indicate that GeoRescue provides a deployment-ready solution with an optimal efficiency–accuracy trade-off for LiDAR sensing and robotics perception in complex, real-world scenarios.