On the Affinity between 3D Detectors and Descriptors

The literature on local invariant 3D features is growing, also fostered by the advent of cheap off-the-shelf 3D sensors. Although several recent proposals in the field include both a detector and a descriptor, some of the most successful and used descriptors do not define a companion detector. Moreover, as vouched by the related field of image features, detectors and descriptors defined within the same proposal do not necessarily yield the highest performance when used together. Hence, in this work we investigate on the effectiveness of the many possible combinations between state-of-the-art 3D detectors and descriptors, so as to identify optimal pairs as well as highlight well-matched detectors for those descriptors lacking a companion feature detection algorithm.