DOI: 10.3390/info17060611 ISSN: 2078-2489

Research on Spanning Tree Topology Optimization and Pyramid-Based Fine Alignment Algorithm for Multi-View Point Cloud Registration

Chang Deng, Pingqing Fan, Hongzhou Chen

Multi-view point cloud registration is a fundamental technology for 3D reconstruction and indoor robot navigation and remains a core challenge for robust environmental perception. Its key difficulty lies in achieving globally consistent alignment of multiple partially overlapping point clouds efficiently and reliably. To address the limitations of existing methods, including low registration accuracy under small overlaps, severe error accumulation in long sequences, and the difficulty of balancing computational efficiency with global consistency, this paper proposes a multi-view point cloud registration framework that integrates spanning tree-based global topology constraints with a multi-scale pyramid-based local refinement strategy, specifically validated for indoor environments. First, a Voxel-Guided Normal Consistency Keypoint Extraction (VG-NCKE) method is presented. It leverages voxel grids to guide stable computation of local geometric features and filters candidate keypoints using a neighborhood normal direction consistency metric, effectively improving keypoint repeatability and spatial uniformity on unevenly distributed point clouds. Second, a coarse registration strategy with global constraints is constructed based on the Overlap Confidence-weighted Minimum Spanning Tree (OC-WST). It quantifies inter-frame overlap reliability as edge weights and employs Prim’s algorithm to build the minimum spanning tree as the topological skeleton for global registration. By prioritizing high-overlap frame pairs, the method suppresses error propagation and reduces the complexity of multi-view registration. Additionally, a multi-scale pyramid ICP fine registration algorithm is designed. It adopts a point-to-plane error model instead of the traditional point-to-point distance metric and performs progressive optimization through a three-layer point cloud pyramid from coarse to fine. This expands the convergence basin and gradually improves alignment accuracy, mitigating the sensitivity of single-scale ICP to initial poses. Extensive experiments on the indoor 3DMatch dataset and real indoor LiDAR sequences demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms competing approaches in terms of registration accuracy, computational efficiency, and long-sequence robustness, validating its effectiveness for indoor multi-view point cloud registration tasks.

More from our Archive