SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration

Extracting robust and general 3D local features is key to downstream tasks such as point cloud registration and reconstruction. Existing learning-based local descriptors are either sensitive to rotation transformations, or rely on classical handcrafted features which are neither general nor representative. In this paper, we introduce a new, yet conceptually simple, neural architecture, termed SpinNet, to extract local features which are rotationally invariant whilst sufficiently informative to enable accurate registration. A Spatial Point Transformer is first introduced to map the input local surface into a carefully designed cylindrical space, enabling end-to-end optimization with SO(2) equivariant representation. A Neural Feature Extractor which leverages the powerful point-based and 3D cylindrical convolutional neural layers is then utilized to derive a compact and representative descriptor for matching. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that SpinNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques by a large margin. More critically, it has the best generalization ability across unseen scenarios with different sensor modalities. The code is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SpinNet.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Point Cloud Registration 3DMatch Benchmark SpinNet (no code published as of Dec 15 2020) Feature Matching Recall 97.6 # 4
Point Cloud Registration 3DMatch (trained on KITTI) SpinNet Recall 0.845 # 2
Point Cloud Registration ETH (trained on 3DMatch) SpinNet Feature Matching Recall 0.928 # 2
Recall (30cm, 5 degrees) 73.07 # 8
Point Cloud Registration FPv1 SpinNet Recall (3cm, 10 degrees) 42.46 # 5
RRE (degrees) 3.105 # 6
RTE (cm) 1.670 # 5
Point Cloud Registration KITTI SpinNet Success Rate 99.10 # 3
Point Cloud Registration KITTI (trained on 3DMatch) SpinNet Success Rate 81.44 # 9

Methods