Point Cloud Registration

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Overview

Point cloud registration estimates how two or more 3D scans relate, enabling map building, robot localization, scene reconstruction, and alignment of medical or industrial data. Classical methods such as ICP and GICP refine geometric matches, while RANSAC, optimal transport, and global optimization help handle outliers, partial overlap, and poor initial poses; learned descriptors and transformer-based matchers provide another route to correspondences. Current work combines these approaches with image, radar, inertial, semantic, or temporal information to support cross-sensor and deformable registration, including settings with sparse measurements. A central challenge is achieving reliable accuracy across unseen scenes and sensor setups while remaining efficient and robust to low overlap, ambiguity, and geometrically degenerate environments.

Latest papers

CardsList

110 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Representing 3D Faces with Learnable B-Spline Volumes

    Apr 14, 2026Prashanth Chandran, Daoye Wang, Timo Bolkart3D Representation Learning3D Face Reconstruction

    Google

  2. R3PM-Net: Real-time, Robust, Real-world Point Matching Network

    Apr 6, 2026Yasaman Kashefbahrami, Erkut Akdag, Panagiotis Meletis +3Point Cloud Registration

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology · Sioux Technologies

  3. G-EDF-Loc: 3D Continuous Gaussian Distance Field for Robust Gradient-Based 6DoF Localization

    Apr 6, 2026José E. Maese, Lucía Coto-Elena, Luis Merino +1Map-Based LocalizationPoint Cloud Registration

    The authors are with the Service Robotics Laboratory, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain.

  4. Deformation-based In-Context Learning for Point Cloud Understanding

    Apr 3, 2026Chengxing Lin, Jinhong Deng, Yinjie Lei +1Point Cloud DenoisingPoint Cloud Learning

    Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, UESTC · School of Computer Science and Engineering, UESTC · Sichuan University

  5. Hg-I2P: Bridging Modalities for Generalizable Image-to-Point-Cloud Registration via Heterogeneous Graphs

    Mar 30, 2026Pei An, Junfeng Ding, Jiaqi Yang +32D-3D Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China · Northwestern Polytechnical University, China · Huazhong Agricultural University, China +1

  6. GLASS: Geometry-aware Local Alignment and Structure Synchronization Network for 2D-3D Registration

    Mar 27, 2026Zhixin Cheng, Jiacheng Deng, Xinjun Li +52D-3D Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China · Meituan Inc, Beijing 100000, China · Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China

  7. DC-Reg: Globally Optimal Point Cloud Registration via Tight Bounding with Difference of Convex Programming

    Mar 26, 2026Wei Lian, Fei Ma, Hang Pan +2Point Cloud RegistrationNonconvex Optimization

    Department of Computer Science, Changzhi University, Changzhi, Shanxi, China, 046011 · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China

  8. KitchenTwin: Semantically and Geometrically Grounded 3D Kitchen Digital Twins

    Mar 25, 2026Quanyun Wu, Kyle Gao, Daniel Long +3Digital Twins3D Scene Representation

    University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

  9. Mamba Learns in Context: Structure-Aware Domain Generalization for Multi-Task Point Cloud Understanding

    Mar 21, 2026Jincen Jiang, Qianyu Zhou, Yuhang Li +5Point Cloud DenoisingPoint Cloud Learning

    Bournemouth University · Jilin University · The University of Western Australia +2

  10. World Reconstruction From Inconsistent Views

    Mar 17, 2026Lukas Höllein, Matthias Nießner3D Reconstruction3D Scene Generation

    Technical University of Munich, Germany

  11. RegFormer++: An Efficient Large-Scale 3D LiDAR Point Registration Network with Projection-Aware 2D Transformer

    Mar 15, 2026Jiuming Liu, Guangming Wang, Zhe Liu +7Point Cloud Registration3D ViTs

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, State Key Laboratory of Avionics Integration and Aviation System-of-Systems Synthesis, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. · Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK. · China University of Mining and Technology. +4

  12. CMHANet: A Cross-Modal Hybrid Attention Network for Point Cloud Registration

    Mar 13, 2026Dongxu Zhang, Yingsen Wang, Yiding Sun +33D Shape MatchingPoint Cloud Registration

    School of Software, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No. 28 Xianning West Road, China · CEPRI, China Electric Power Research Institute No. 15 Xiaoying East Road, Qinghe, Haidian District, Beijing, China

  13. IGASA: Integrated Geometry-Aware and Skip-Attention Modules for Enhanced Point Cloud Registration

    Mar 13, 2026Dongxu Zhang, Jihua Zhu, Shiqi Li +4Point Cloud RegistrationPoint Cloud Learning

  14. High-Precision 6DOF Pose Estimation via Global Phase Retrieval in Fringe Projection Profilometry for 3D Mapping

    Mar 12, 2026Sehoon Tak, Keunhee Cho, Sangpil Kim +13D MappingObject Pose Estimation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, South Korea. · Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul

  15. TacLoc: Global Tactile Localization on Objects from a Registration Perspective

    Mar 11, 2026Zirui Zhang, Boyang Zhang, Fumin Zhang +1Object Pose EstimationPoint Cloud Registration

  16. Tracing Back Error Sources to Explain and Mitigate Pose Estimation Failures

    Mar 3, 2026Loris Schneider, Yitian Shi, Rosa Wolf +3Object Pose EstimationRobust Estimation

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany. · German Aerospace Center (DLR), Weßling, Germany.

  17. Toward Zero-Shot Point Cloud Registration Across Diverse Scales, Scenes, and Sensor Setups

    Jan 6, 2026Hyungtae Lim, Minkyun Seo, Luca Carlone +1Point Cloud Registration

    Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  18. NeuralBoneReg: An Instance-Specific Label-Free Point Cloud-Based Method for Multi-Modal Bone Surface Registration

    Nov 18, 2025Luohong Wu, Matthias Seibold, Nicola A. Cavalcanti +5Medical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Research in Orthopedic Computer Science, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich, Lengghalde 5, Zurich, 8008, Zurich, Switzerland · AI Center, ETH Zurich, Ramistrasse 101, Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

  19. DCReg: Decoupled Characterization for Efficient Degenerate LiDAR Registration

    Sep 8, 2025Xiangcheng Hu, Xieyuanli Chen, Mingkai Jia +3Point Cloud RegistrationLiDAR Localization

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Department of Mechanical Engineering at National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan · School of Intelligent Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China +1

  20. Registering the 4D Millimeter Wave Radar Point Clouds Via Generalized Method of Moments

    Aug 4, 2025Xingyi Li, Han Zhang, Ziliang Wang +2Millimeter-Wave RadarmmWave Radar Sensing

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Department of Statistics, Uppsala University, Sweden