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. FlashReg: GPU-Accelerated 3-Clique Point Cloud Registration for Real-Time Correspondence-to-Pose Estimation

    Aug 22, 2026Ziyang Yu, Xiang Li, Qiong Chang +1Point Cloud RegistrationGraph Matching

    School of Computing Institute of Science Tokyo Tokyo

  2. CVSD-Reg: Cross-Modal Visual Semantic Prior Distillation for Robust LiDAR Registration

    Aug 20, 2026Eunsoo Im, Junghun Suh, Gyeonggwan Lee +1Point Cloud RegistrationPoint Cloud Learning

  3. LF-GICP: Parameter-Free Degeneracy-Aware LiDAR Odometry via a Voxel-Normal Localizability Field

    Aug 20, 2026Eunsoo ImLiDAR OdometryPoint Cloud Registration

  4. Degenerate in Whose Frame? An Equivariance Condition for Degeneracy Detection in LiDAR Registration

    Aug 16, 2026Yujie Zhang, Chunlei Zhao, Yuzong Lin +3Point Cloud Registration

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300401, China

  5. HP2-SLAM: Adaptive Hybrid ICP for Robust and Efficient LiDAR SLAM

    Aug 15, 2026Nam Tran, Thu Tran, Hieu Phan +4Simultaneous Localization and MappingLiDAR Localization

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA · VinRobotics · Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

  6. Robotic Fabric Alignment System for Sewing Using Global Local Weighted ICP

    Aug 10, 2026Wenbo Dong, Dipankar Bhattacharya Member, Kai Tang +5Object Pose EstimationRobotic Manipulation

    JC STEM Lab of Robotics for Soft Materials, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom · Unprecedented-scale Data Analytics Center, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-0845, Japan +4

  7. APCReg: Anatomical-Prior-Guided Coarse-to-Fine CBCT--IOS Registration via Multi-View Projection and Reliability-Controlled Residual Correction

    Aug 7, 2026Xincan Zheng, Yaqi Wang, Zhi Li +4Cone-Beam CTMedical Image Registration

    School of Cyberspace Security, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China · Innovation Center for Electronic Design Automation Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China · Department of Craniomaxillofacial Surgery, Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China +2

  8. Toward surface-based registration of a virtual preoperative cutting guide onto the mandible for reconstruction surgery

    Aug 6, 2026Yue Yang, Jie Ying WuMedical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Vanderbilt University, Department of Computer Science, 1400 18th Avenue South, Suite A4004 Nashville, TN 37212, USA.

  9. Ordered Diffusion for 3D Human Registration

    Aug 6, 2026Mattia Masiero, Ilya A. Petrov, Daniel Cremers +2Point Cloud Registration3D Diffusion Models

    University of Tübingen, Germany · Tübingen AI Center, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Germany +2

  10. Test Time Adaptation Methods for Point Cloud Registration in Laparoscopic Surgery

    Aug 3, 2026Nina Bodelot, Soufiane Belharbi, Eric GrangerSynthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationTest-Time Adaptation

    LIVIA, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montreal, Canada

  11. Coarse-to-Fine Registration of Jawbone CT and Intraoral Scan Data Using GeDi and ICP with Pseudo-IOS Ground Truth

    Aug 3, 2026Sho Mitarai, Hikaru Kayo, Hisashi Ozaki +2Medical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    School of Human Health Sciences, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. · Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital, Kyoto, Japan.

  12. RaDiVe: Robust 4D Radar Odometry with Distance-Bounded NDT and Velocity-Discrepancy Point Uncertainty

    Jul 30, 2026Sangwoo Jung, Dongjae Lee, Chiyun Noh +1mmWave Radar SensingPoint Cloud Registration

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, SNU, Seoul, S. Korea

  13. R-SLPR: Region-based Small-to-Large Point-cloud Registration with Contrastive Learning

    Jul 29, 2026Yusen Wan, Zeyuan Chen, Qianshi Zou +1Point Cloud Registration

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

  14. SHReg: Strictly Rotation-Equivariant Point Cloud Registration via Spherical Harmonics

    Jul 25, 2026Chongjian Wang, Junjie GaoEquivariant Neural NetworksGeometric Representation Learning

    College of Mathematics and Systems Science, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Women’s University, Jinan, China

  15. DTIF: Robust Loop Closure Detection via Delaunay Triangle Topology in Complex Forests

    Jul 23, 2026Xin Zhao, Jianping Li, Qin Zou +3Point Cloud RegistrationLoop Closure Detection

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China

  16. Cross-Coordinate Correspondence Pruning for Image-to-Point Cloud Registration

    Jul 19, 2026Xin Liu, Rong Qin, Huipeng Lin +5Point Cloud RegistrationCross-Modal Feature Matching

    VCIP & TMCC & DISSec, College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, China. · AutoCity (Shenzhen) Autonomous Driving Co., Ltd, Shenzhen, China. · School of Intelligent Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China. +4

  17. Move First, Commit Later: Selective LiDAR-to-BIM Global Initialization by Verifying Proposals Against Competing Explanations

    Jul 19, 2026Yujie Zhang, Yuxuan Guo, Zeheng Fan +3Point Cloud RegistrationLiDAR Localization

    School of Mechanical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300401, China.

  18. Cluster-Aware Matching via Laplacian Optimal Transport

    Jul 17, 2026Gabriel Samberg, YoonHaeng Hur, Yuehaw Khoo +1ClusteringGraph Matching

    Department of Applied Mathematics, Tel Aviv University · Department of Statistics, Columbia University · Department of Statistics, University of Chicago

  19. DINE: Distance Is Not Enough -- Learning Global Deformation Priors for Robust Soft-Tissue Point Cloud Registration

    Jul 16, 2026Sara Monji-Azad, Rohit Beer, Marvin Kinz +2Medical Image RegistrationPoint Cloud Registration

    Mannheim Institute for Intelligent Systems in Medicine (MIISM), Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany · Department of Radiation Oncology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA · Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Mannheim, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany +4

  20. Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Made Easy with Rectified Flow-based LiDAR Upsampling

    Jul 16, 2026Reon Tabata, Kenji Koide, Shuji Oishi +4Camera-LiDAR FusionPoint Cloud Registration

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Aichi, Japan · National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

  21. Bi-PT: Bidirectional Cross-Attention Point Transformers for Four-Chamber Heart Reconstruction from Sparse Cardiac MRI Data

    Jul 8, 2026Chenchuhui Hu, Shaoming Pan, Leon Axel +1Transformer3D Medical Imaging

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, USA · School of Medicine, New York University, New York, NY, USA

  22. Neural LiDAR Bundle Adjustment

    Jul 5, 2026Chin Yung Anson Hon, Kaicheng Zhang, Sen Wang3D MappingPoint Cloud Registration

    Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

  23. Robust 3D Alignment of Generative Reconstructions via Partial Monocular Observations

    Jul 1, 2026Yuchen Zhang, Luanyuan Dai, Yiwei Wang +7Point Cloud Registration

    School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 210094, Nanjing, China · School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, 19104, Philadelphia, USA +7

  24. PinNet: Keypoint-Aware Learned Local Descriptors with Geometric Embedding for Loop Closure in LiDAR SLAM

    Jun 26, 2026Yanlong Ma, Nakul S. Joshi, Christa S. Robison +2Simultaneous Localization and MappingRepresentation Learning

    University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA. · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Adelphi, MD, USA.

  25. Scalable and Differentiable Point-Cloud Registration Using Maximum Mean Discrepancy

    Jun 26, 2026Rixon Crane, Fahira Afzal Maken, Nicholas Lawrance +4Point Cloud Registration

    Data61, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia · Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia · Work done while at Data61, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia +3

  26. UAV-MapFusion: RTK-Aligned Uncertainty-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Multi-Session UAV Mapping

    Jun 25, 2026Feng Pan, Chunran Zheng, Bing Xue +4Point Cloud Registration

    College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China · Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China

  27. FAR-LIO: Enabling High-Speed Autonomy through Fast, Accurate, and Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

    Jun 24, 2026Maximilian Leitenstern, Marcel Weinmann, Patrick Haft +3Inertial OdometryLiDAR Odometry

    Institute of Automotive Technology, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, Germany · NVIDIA Corp., USA

  28. Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

    Jun 18, 2026Qingyun Yang, Jon S. Heiselman, Ayberk Acar +5OncologyPoint Cloud Registration

    Vanderbilt University, Department of Computer Science, 2301 Vanderbilt Pl, Nashville, United States · Vanderbilt University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, 2301 Vanderbilt Pl, Nashville, United States · Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, 1211 Medical Center Drive, Nashville, United States

  29. Sinkhorn-CPD: Robust point cloud registration via unbalanced entropic optimal transport

    Jun 15, 2026Jin Zhang, Mingyang Zhao, Bing Liu +1Point Cloud RegistrationOptimal Transport

    LMIB & School of Mathematical Sciences, Beihang University, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Sciences, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China +1

  30. Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

    Jun 11, 2026Siyu Zhou, Zhongliang Jiang3D ViTsPoint Cloud Registration

    The Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. · The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China