A histogram-based sampling method for point cloud registration

Abstract

Accurate and efficient point cloud registration is essential in various fields, such as robotics, autonomous driving and medical imaging. The size of point clouds presents a significant challenge for existing registration methods. In this paper, a novel point cloud sampling method to improve the performance of the point cloud registration process is proposed. Instead of geometric feature preservation, which is preferred in most existing sampling methods, our approach scales every point and groups the scaled points into clusters to generate a histogram for the point cloud. The histogram is then used to identify the most significant regions of the point cloud to create the downsampled output data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves accuracy and is robust against noise. Registration errors are reduced by up to 7% in rotation and 116% in translation. Additionally, the proposed method filtered out up to 98% of noise from the point cloud that was uniformly distributed at a rate of 25%.