Iterative Closest Point via MultiKernel Correntropy for Point Cloud Fine Registration

The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method, primarily used for transformation estimation, is a crucial technique in 3D signal processing, especially for point cloud fine registration. However, traditional ICP is prone to local optima and sensitive to noise, especially when there is no good initialization. Based on the observation that registration errors typically exhibit a multimodal distribution under large rotational offsets and noisy environments, the MultiKernel Correntropy (MKC), which can estimate the registration error distribution, is introduced to provide global information for ICP. Moreover, since MKC consists of multiple Gaussian kernels, it can effectively resist most of the noise. A MultiKernel Correntropy based Iterative Closest Point (MKCICP) is proposed. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets show that MKCICP achieves better performance compared to other related methods in challenging scenarios involving large rotational angles, low partial overlap, and high noise levels.