A Fast and Robust Rotation Search and Point Cloud Registration Method for 2D Stitching and 3D Object Localization

Rotation search and point cloud registration are two fundamental problems in robotics, geometric vision, and remote sensing, which aim to estimate the rotation and transformation between the 3D vector sets and point clouds, respectively. Due to the presence of outliers (probably in very large numbers) among the putative vector or point correspondences in real-world applications, robust estimation is of great importance. In this paper, we present Inlier searching using COmpatible Structures (ICOS), a novel, efficient, and highly robust solver for both the correspondence-based rotation search and point cloud registration problems. Specifically, we (i) propose and construct a series of compatible structures for the two problems, based on which various invariants can be established, and (ii) design time-efficient frameworks to filter out outliers and seek inliers from the invariant-constrained random sampling based on the compatible structures proposed. In this manner, even with extreme outlier ratios, inliers can be effectively sifted out and collected for solving the optimal rotation and transformation, leading to our robust solver ICOS. Through plentiful experiments over standard datasets, we demonstrated that: (i) our solver ICOS is fast, accurate, and robust against over 95% outliers with nearly a 100% recall ratio of inliers for rotation search and both known-scale and unknown-scale registration, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods, and (ii) ICOS is practical for use in real-world application problems including 2D image stitching and 3D object localization.