DeepVCP: An End-to-End Deep Neural Network for Point Cloud Registration

We present DeepVCP - a novel end-to-end learning-based 3D point cloud registration framework that achieves comparable registration accuracy to prior state-of-the-art geometric methods. Different from other keypoint based methods where a RANSAC procedure is usually needed, we implement the use of various deep neural network structures to establish an end-to-end trainable network. Our keypoint detector is trained through this end-to-end structure and enables the system to avoid the interference of dynamic objects, leverages the help of sufficiently salient features on stationary objects, and as a result, achieves high robustness. Rather than searching the corresponding points among existing points, the key contribution is that we innovatively generate them based on learned matching probabilities among a group of candidates, which can boost the registration accuracy. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of our approach using both the KITTI dataset and the Apollo-SouthBay dataset. Results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable registration accuracy and runtime efficiency to the state-of-the-art geometry-based methods, but with higher robustness to inaccurate initial poses. Detailed ablation and visualization analysis are included to further illustrate the behavior and insights of our network. The low registration error and high robustness of our method make it attractive to the substantial applications relying on the point cloud registration task.