# Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/

## Key facts

- Cited by 321 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 321)

- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining of 3D Features on any Point-Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02691/) (2021)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Robust Point Cloud Registration Framework Based on Deep Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04256/) (2021)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [Trans-SVNet: Accurate Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos via Hybrid Embedding Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09712/) (2021)
- [Towards Large-scale 3D Representation Learning with Multi-dataset Point Prompt Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09718/) (2023)
- [Lepard: Learning partial point cloud matching in rigid and deformable scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12591/) (2021)
- [A comprehensive survey on point cloud registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02690/) (2021)
- [GeoTransformer: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration with Geometric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03768/) (2023)
- [SparseFusion: Fusing Multi-Modal Sparse Representations for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14340/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition Against Common Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12296/) (2022)
- [Point Cloud Upsampling via Disentangled Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04779/) (2021)
- [You Only Hypothesize Once: Point Cloud Registration with Rotation-equivariant Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00182/) (2021)
- [LCDNet: Deep Loop Closure Detection and Point Cloud Registration for LiDAR SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05056/) (2021)
- [Point Cloud Mamba: Point Cloud Learning via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00762/) (2024)
- [SC^2-PCR: A Second Order Spatial Compatibility for Efficient and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14453/) (2022)
- [DeepI2P: Image-to-Point Cloud Registration via Deep Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03501/) (2021)
- [Motion Inspired Unsupervised Perception and Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08061/) (2022)
- [Masked Scene Contrast: A Scalable Framework for Unsupervised 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14191/) (2023)
- [Diffusion 3D Features (Diff3F): Decorating Untextured Shapes with Distilled Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17024/) (2023)
- [Deep Hough Voting for Robust Global Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04310/) (2021)
- [OMNet: Learning Overlapping Mask for Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00937/) (2021)
- [Shape registration in the time of transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13679/) (2021)
- [HRegNet: A Hierarchical Network for Large-scale Outdoor LiDAR Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11992/) (2021)
- [TAX-Pose: Task-Specific Cross-Pose Estimation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09325/) (2022)
- [UnsupervisedR&R: Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration via Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11870/) (2021)
- [CorrI2P: Deep Image-to-Point Cloud Registration via Dense Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05483/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud registration is a key problem for computer vision applied to robotics, medical imaging, and other applications. This problem involves finding a rigid transformation from one point cloud into another so that they align. Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and its variants provide simple and easily-implemented iterative methods for this task, but these algorithms can converge to spurious local optima. To address local optima and other difficulties in the ICP pipeline, we propose a learning-based method, titled Deep Closest Point (DCP), inspired by recent techniques in computer vision and natural language processing. Our model consists of three parts: a point cloud embedding network, an attention-based module combined with a pointer generation layer, to approximate combinatorial matching, and a differentiable singular value decomposition (SVD) layer to extract the final rigid transformation. We train our model end-to-end on the ModelNet40 dataset and show in several settings that it performs better than ICP, its variants (e.g., Go-ICP, FGR), and the recently-proposed learning-based method PointNetLK. Beyond providing a state-of-the-art registration technique, we evaluate the suitability of our learned features transferred to unseen objects. We also provide preliminary analysis of our learned model to help understand whether domain-specific and/or global features facilitate rigid registration.