Self-supervised Point Cloud Registration with Deep Versatile Descriptors

Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend toward solving point cloud registration problems with various deep learning-based algorithms. Compared to supervised/semi-supervised registration methods, unsupervised methods require no human annotations. However, unsupervised methods mainly depend on the global descriptors, which ignore the high-level representations of local geometries. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised registration scheme with a novel Deep Versatile Descriptors (DVD), jointly considering global representations and local representations. The DVD is motivated by a key observation that the local distinctive geometric structures of the point cloud by two subset points can be employed to enhance the representation ability of the feature extraction module. Furthermore, we utilize two additional tasks (reconstruction and normal estimation) to enhance the transformation awareness of the proposed DVDs. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance against competing methods over a wide range of experimental settings.