Nvidia Corporation

Benjamin David Eckart

Jan Kautz

Kihwan Kim

Alejandro Jose Troccoli

Point cloud registration sits at the core of many important and challenging 3D perception problems including autonomous navigation, object/scene recognition, and augmented reality (AR). A new registration algorithm is presented that achieves speed and accuracy by registering a point cloud to a representation of a reference point cloud. A target point cloud is registered to the reference point cloud by iterating through a number of cycles of an EM algorithm where, during an Expectation step, each point in the target point cloud is associated with a node of a hierarchical tree data structure and, during a Maximization step, an estimated transformation is determined based on the association of the points with corresponding nodes of the hierarchical tree data structure. The estimated transformation is determined by solving a minimization problem associated with a sum, over a number of mixture components, over terms related to a Mahalanobis distance.

Fast multi-scale point cloud registration with a hierarchical gaussian mixture

A method, computer readable medium, and system are disclosed for generating a Gaussian mixture model hierarchy. The method includes the steps of receiving point cloud data defining a plurality of points; defining a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) hierarchy that includes a number of mixels, each mixel encoding parameters for a probabilistic occupancy map; and adjusting the parameters for one or more probabilistic occupancy maps based on the point cloud data utilizing a number of iterations of an Expectation-Maximum (EM) algorithm.

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Pittsburgh, PA, United States of America

Benjamin David Eckart