A 3D Descriptor based on Local Height Image

This paper proposes a novel 3D local descriptor, which seeks a good balance between the efficiency and the accuracy. We use the Local Reference Frame (LRF) to estimate a robust coordinate system to describe the local 3D shape. A novel Local Height Image (LHI) is defined by projecting the 3D points in the support region onto the tangent plane of the basis point. The Local Height Image Descriptor (LHID) is then defined by calculating the averaged projection distances. We further smooth the LHID to resist various kinds of interferences. We setup several experiments to assess the performance of our descriptor by comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which not only achieves the high accuracy as well as the robustness, but also possesses low complexity for the efficiency.