# RegFormer: An Efficient Projection-Aware Transformer Network for Large-Scale Point Cloud Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [TEASER: Fast and Certifiable Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07715/) (2020)
- [PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration using PointNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05711/) (2019)
- [Deep Global Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11540/) (2020)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [RPM-Net: Robust Point Matching using Learned Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13479/) (2020)
- [PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02669/) (2018)
- [D3Feat: Joint Learning of Dense Detection and Description of 3D Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03164/) (2020)
- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [PointDSC: Robust Point Cloud Registration using Deep Spatial Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05465/) (2021)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [Feature-metric Registration: A Fast Semi-supervised Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01014/) (2020)
- [3DFeat-Net: Weakly Supervised Local 3D Features for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09413/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DeepICP: An End-to-End Deep Neural Network for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04153/) (2019)
- [SC^2-PCR: A Second Order Spatial Compatibility for Efficient and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14453/) (2022)
- [LO-Net: Deep Real-time Lidar Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08242/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [PLGSLAM: Progressive Neural Scene Represenation with Local to Global Bundle Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09866/) (2023)
- [Lexicon3D: Probing Visual Foundation Models for Complex 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03757/) (2024)
- [NeSLAM: Neural Implicit Mapping and Self-Supervised Feature Tracking With Depth Completion and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20034/) (2024)
- [DVLO: Deep Visual-LiDAR Odometry with Local-to-Global Feature Fusion and Bi-Directional Structure Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18274/) (2024)
- [SwiftVLA: Unlocking Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Lightweight VLA Models at Minimal Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00903/) (2025)
- [DriveVA: Video Action Models are Zero-Shot Drivers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04198/) (2026)
- [ConeSep: Cone-based Robust Noise-Unlearning Compositional Network for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20358/) (2026)
- [3DSFLabelling: Boosting 3D Scene Flow Estimation by Pseudo Auto-labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18146/) (2024)
- [Incremental Joint Learning of Depth, Pose and Implicit Scene Representation on Monocular Camera in Large-scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06050/) (2024)
- [TurboReg: TurboClique for Robust and Efficient Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01439/) (2025)
- [LiftFeat: 3D Geometry-Aware Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03422/) (2025)
- [Render-in-the-Loop: Vector Graphics Generation via Visual Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20730/) (2026)
- [DifFlow3D: Toward Robust Uncertainty-Aware Scene Flow Estimation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17456/) (2023)
- [MAMBA4D: Efficient Long-Sequence Point Cloud Video Understanding with Disentangled Spatial-Temporal State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14338/) (2024)
- [Hy-Facial: Hybrid Feature Extraction by Dimensionality Reduction Methods for Enhanced Facial Expression Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26614/) (2025)
- [PNAS-MOT: Multi-Modal Object Tracking with Pareto Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15712/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal UAV Detection, Classification and Tracking Algorithm -- Technical Report for CVPR 2024 UG2 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16464/) (2024)
- [Spherical Frustum Sparse Convolution Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17491/) (2023)
- [ZeroReg: Zero-Shot Point Cloud Registration with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03032/) (2023)
- [RoGs: Large Scale Road Surface Reconstruction with Meshgrid Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14342/) (2024)
- [Filling Missing Values Matters for Range Image-Based Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10175/) (2024)
- [PointRegGPT: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Registration using Generative Point-Cloud Pairs for Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14054/) (2024)
- [NeuroGauss4D-PCI: 4D Neural Fields and Gaussian Deformation Fields for Point Cloud Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14241/) (2024)
- [DSLO: Deep Sequence LiDAR Odometry Based on Inconsistent Spatio-temporal Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00744/) (2024)
- [DVLO4D: Deep Visual-Lidar Odometry with Sparse Spatial-temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06023/) (2025)
- [GGPT: Geometry Grounded Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11174/) (2026)
- [RegFormer++: An Efficient Large-Scale 3D LiDAR Point Registration Network with Projection-Aware 2D Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14290/) (2026)
- [3D Registration in 30 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13735/) (2024)
- [Neural Predictor-Corrector: Solving Homotopy Problems with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03086/) (2026)
- [RL-ScanIQA: Reinforcement-Learned Scanpaths for Blind 360degImage Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14297/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although point cloud registration has achieved remarkable advances in object-level and indoor scenes, large-scale registration methods are rarely explored. Challenges mainly arise from the huge point number, complex distribution, and outliers of outdoor LiDAR scans. In addition, most existing registration works generally adopt a two-stage paradigm: They first find correspondences by extracting discriminative local features and then leverage estimators (eg. RANSAC) to filter outliers, which are highly dependent on well-designed descriptors and post-processing choices. To address these problems, we propose an end-to-end transformer network (RegFormer) for large-scale point cloud alignment without any further post-processing. Specifically, a projection-aware hierarchical transformer is proposed to capture long-range dependencies and filter outliers by extracting point features globally. Our transformer has linear complexity, which guarantees high efficiency even for large-scale scenes. Furthermore, to effectively reduce mismatches, a bijective association transformer is designed for regressing the initial transformation. Extensive experiments on KITTI and NuScenes datasets demonstrate that our RegFormer achieves competitive performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.