Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration with Self-Distillation


Christian Löwens (Bosch), Thorben Funke (Bosch), André Wagner (Bosch), Alexandru Paul Condurache (Bosch)
The 35th British Machine Vision Conference
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Abstract

Rigid point cloud registration is a fundamental problem and highly relevant in robotics and autonomous driving. Nowadays deep learning methods can be trained to match a pair of point clouds, given the transformation between them. However, this training is often not scalable due to the high cost of collecting ground truth poses. Therefore, we present a self-distillation approach to learn point cloud registration in an unsupervised fashion. Here, each sample is passed to a teacher network and an augmented view is passed to a student network. The teacher includes a trainable feature extractor and a learning-free robust solver such as RANSAC. The solver forces consistency among correspondences and optimizes for the unsupervised inlier ratio, eliminating the need for ground truth labels. Our approach simplifies the training procedure by removing the need for initial hand-crafted features or consecutive point cloud frames as seen in related methods. We show that our method not only surpasses them on the RGB-D benchmark 3DMatch but also generalizes well to automotive radar, where classical features adopted by others fail.

Citation

@inproceedings{Löwens_2024_BMVC,
author    = {Christian Löwens and Thorben Funke and André Wagner and Alexandru Paul Condurache},
title     = {Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration with Self-Distillation},
booktitle = {35th British Machine Vision Conference 2024, {BMVC} 2024, Glasgow, UK, November 25-28, 2024},
publisher = {BMVA},
year      = {2024},
url       = {https://papers.bmvc2024.org/0663.pdf}
}


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