# USIP: Unsupervised Stable Interest Point Detection from 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00229 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00229/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [PointDSC: Robust Point Cloud Registration using Deep Spatial Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05465/) (2021)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [FS6D: Few-Shot 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14628/) (2022)
- [DeepI2P: Image-to-Point Cloud Registration via Deep Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03501/) (2021)
- [HRegNet: A Hierarchical Network for Large-scale Outdoor LiDAR Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11992/) (2021)
- [P2-Net: Joint Description and Detection of Local Features for Pixel and Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01055/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Registration of Images and LiDAR Point Clouds with VoxelPoint-to-Pixel Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04060/) (2023)
- [Skeleton Merger: an Unsupervised Aligned Keypoint Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10814/) (2021)
- [LAKe-Net: Topology-Aware Point Cloud Completion by Localizing Aligned Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16771/) (2022)
- [USEEK: Unsupervised SE(3)-Equivariant 3D Keypoints for Generalizable Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13864/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03114/) (2021)
- [EgoNN: Egocentric Neural Network for Point Cloud Based 6DoF Relocalization at the City Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12486/) (2021)
- [RIGA: Rotation-Invariant and Globally-Aware Descriptors for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13252/) (2022)
- [Correspondence-Free Point Cloud Registration with SO(3)-Equivariant Implicit Shape Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10296/) (2021)
- [Point-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation for Point Cloud Registration Using Multitask Meta-Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16481/) (2023)
- [Reliable Inlier Evaluation for Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11292/) (2022)
- [3D Implicit Transporter for Temporally Consistent Keypoint Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05098/) (2023)
- [NCP: Neural Correspondence Prior for Effective Unsupervised Shape Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05839/) (2023)
- [Learning to Estimate 6DoF Pose from Limited Data: A Few-Shot, Generalizable Approach using RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07598/) (2023)
- [One2Any: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation for Any Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04109/) (2025)
- [Back to 3D: Few-Shot 3D Keypoint Detection with Back-Projected 2D Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18113/) (2023)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Loop Closing and Relocalization for Reliable LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08086/) (2023)
- [FINet: Dual Branches Feature Interaction for Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03479/) (2021)
- [SNAKE: Shape-aware Neural 3D Keypoint Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01724/) (2022)
- [Robust Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration in a Full Range](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15606/) (2021)
- [3D Human Keypoints Estimation From Point Clouds in the Wild Without Human Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04745/) (2023)
- [End-to-end 2D-3D Registration between Image and LiDAR Point Cloud for Vehicle Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11346/) (2023)
- [SC3K: Self-supervised and Coherent 3D Keypoints Estimation from Rotated, Noisy, and Decimated Point Cloud Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05410/) (2023)
- [EP2P-Loc: End-to-End 3D Point to 2D Pixel Localization for Large-Scale Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07471/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose the USIP detector: an Unsupervised Stable Interest Point detector that can detect highly repeatable and accurately localized keypoints from 3D point clouds under arbitrary transformations without the need for any ground truth training data. Our USIP detector consists of a feature proposal network that learns stable keypoints from input 3D point clouds and their respective transformed pairs from randomly generated transformations. We provide degeneracy analysis of our USIP detector and suggest solutions to prevent it. We encourage high repeatability and accurate localization of the keypoints with a probabilistic chamfer loss that minimizes the distances between the detected keypoints from the training point cloud pairs. Extensive experimental results of repeatability tests on several simulated and real-world 3D point cloud datasets from Lidar, RGB-D and CAD models show that our USIP detector significantly outperforms existing hand-crafted and deep learning-based 3D keypoint detectors. Our code is available at the project website. https://github.com/lijx10/USIP