Hue-assisted automatic registration of color point clouds

This paper describes a variant of the extended Gaussian image based registration algorithm for point clouds with surface color information. The method correlates the distributions of surface normals for rotational alignment and grid occupancy for translational alignment with hue filters applied during the construction of surface normal histograms and occupancy grids. In this method, the size of the point cloud is reduced with a hue-based down sampling that is independent of the point sample density or local geometry. Experimental results show that use of the hue filters increases the registration speed and improves the registration accuracy. Coarse rigid transformations determined in this step enable fine alignment with dense, unfiltered point clouds or using Iterative Common Point (ICP) alignment techniques.