Evolutionary Multitasking Descriptor Optimization for Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is an important task for other point cloud tasks. Feature-based methods are widely adopted for their speed and efficiency in point cloud registration. The descriptive capability of features extracted by a single geometric descriptor is limited. Descriptive capabilities can be improved by concatenating features extracted from multiple descriptors. However, due to the existence of redundant and irrelevant features, the correct corresponding points are difficult to match, which further affects the registration effect. We propose an evolutionary multitasking point cloud descriptor optimization method. Integrate existing descriptors to optimize descriptors with stronger description ability. Labeling features to calculate the feature importance for the registration and generating multitasks. In optimized processing, approximate evaluation which is calculated by prior correspondence saved in the database replaces the expensive searching correspondences process in the entire point cloud. Finally, a multiscale filter is developed to remove error correspondences by the geometric information from multiple scale descriptor features. Experimental demonstrate that the proposed approach can optimize a feature subset with higher descriptive capability compared to other methods and show superior point cloud registration performance on 14 point cloud models. This is the first paper on point cloud descriptor optimization, which provides a new idea for point cloud registration research.