B-SHOT: A binary feature descriptor for fast and efficient keypoint matching on 3D point clouds

In this paper, we introduce the very first ‘binary’ 3D feature descriptor, B-SHOT, for fast and efficient keypoint matching on 3D point clouds. We propose a binary quantization method that converts a real valued vector to a binary vector. We apply this method on a state-of-the-art 3D feature descriptor, SHOT [1], and create a new binary 3D feature descriptor. B-SHOT requires 32 times lesser memory for its representation while being 6 times faster in feature descriptor matching, when compared to the SHOT feature descriptor. Experimental evaluation shows that B-SHOT offers comparable keypoint matching performance to that of the state-of-the-art 3D feature descriptors on a standard benchmark dataset.