# Tigris: Architecture and Algorithms for 3D Perception in Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.07841 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07841/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FlexGaussian: Flexible and Cost-Effective Training-Free Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06671/) (2025)
- [SPADE: Sparse Pillar-based 3D Object Detection Accelerator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07522/) (2023)
- [Thales: Formulating and Estimating Architectural Vulnerability Factors for DNN Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02649/) (2022)
- [Towards Energy-Efficiency by Navigating the Trilemma of Energy, Latency, and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04018/) (2024)
- [FractalCloud: A Fractal-Inspired Architecture for Efficient Large-Scale Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07665/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine perception applications are increasingly moving toward manipulating and processing 3D point cloud. This paper focuses on point cloud registration, a key primitive of 3D data processing widely used in high-level tasks such as odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping, and 3D reconstruction. As these applications are routinely deployed in energy-constrained environments, real-time and energy-efficient point cloud registration is critical. We present Tigris, an algorithm-architecture co-designed system specialized for point cloud registration. Through an extensive exploration of the registration pipeline design space, we find that, while different design points make vastly different trade-offs between accuracy and performance, KD-tree search is a common performance bottleneck, and thus is an ideal candidate for architectural specialization. While KD-tree search is inherently sequential, we propose an acceleration-amenable data structure and search algorithm that exposes different forms of parallelism of KD-tree search in the context of point cloud registration. The co-designed accelerator systematically exploits the parallelism while incorporating a set of architectural techniques that further improve the accelerator efficiency. Overall, Tigris achieves 77.2× speedup and 7.4× power reduction in KD-tree search over an RTX 2080 Ti GPU, which translates to a 41.7% registration performance improvements and 3.0× power reduction.