Multi-Task Multi-Scale Feature Selection for Point Cloud Registration

3D point cloud registration is a process of solving the geometric transformation between two point clouds. This process is an important issue in computer vision and pattern recognition. The registration methods based on geometric features are highly sensitive to the scale of feature extraction. Changes in scale can introduce inaccuracies in feature descriptions, thereby compromising the reliability of the registration results. To mitigate the impact of feature scale on the outcomes and the high-dimensional issue arising from features of different scales, we propose a method for multi-scale point cloud feature selection. We solve the high-dimensional problem of feature selection by designing a multi-task framework. By designing a mutual information dimensionality reduction method, we decomposed the high-dimensional feature selection task of different descriptors with multi-scale features into multiple related low-dimensional feature selection tasks. Then, by means of the knowledge transfer among these low-dimensional feature selection tasks, we sought the best feature subset to obtain more robust feature information. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method by conducting extensive experiments on various datasets. The experimental results show that the method outperforms other feature descriptors in terms of descriptive power and robustness and improves the effectiveness of point cloud registration.