Adaptive registration using 2D and 3D features for indoor scene reconstruction.
Pairwise alignment between point clouds is an important task in building 3D maps of indoor environments with partial information. The combination of 2D local features with depth information provided by RGB D cameras are often used to improve such alignment. However, under varying lighting or low visual texture, indoor pairwise frame registration with sparse 2D local features is not a particularly robust method. In these conditions, features are hard to detect, thus leading to misalignment between consecutive pairs of frames. The use of 3D local features can be a solution as such features come from the 3D points themselves and are resistant to variations in visual texture and illumination. Because varying conditions in real indoor scenes are unavoidable, we propose a new framework to improve the pairwise frame alignment using an adaptive combination of sparse 2D and 3D features based on both the levels of geometric structure and visual texture contained in each scene. Experiments with datasets including unrestricted RGB D camera motion and natural changes in illumination show that the proposed framework convincingly outperforms methods using 2D or 3D features separately, as reflected in better level of alignment accuracy.