# PosDiffNet: Positional Neural Diffusion for Point Cloud Registration in a Large Field of View with Perturbations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Augmented Neural ODEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01681/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [Regularisation of Neural Networks by Enforcing Lipschitz Continuity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04368/) (2018)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [SO-Net: Self-Organizing Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04249/) (2018)
- [LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00258/) (2020)
- [D3Feat: Joint Learning of Dense Detection and Description of 3D Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03164/) (2020)
- [MVX-Net: Multimodal VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01649/) (2019)
- [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)
- [3DRegNet: A Deep Neural Network for 3D Point Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01701/) (2019)
- [AtLoc: Attention Guided Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03557/) (2019)
- [Stable Neural ODE with Lyapunov-Stable Equilibrium Points for Defending Against Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12976/) (2021)
- [Lepard: Learning partial point cloud matching in rigid and deformable scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12591/) (2021)
- [Beltrami Flow and Neural Diffusion on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09443/) (2021)
- [On Robustness of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05513/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Unleashing the Potential of Fractional Calculus in Graph Neural Networks with FROND](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17099/) (2024)
- [3D Registration in 30 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13735/) (2024)
- [MemReg: Streaming Outdoor LiDAR Point Cloud Registration with Hybrid Memory Buffers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud registration is a crucial technique in 3D computer vision with a wide range of applications. However, this task can be challenging, particularly in large fields of view with dynamic objects, environmental noise, or other perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose a model called PosDiffNet. Our approach performs hierarchical registration based on window-level, patch-level, and point-level correspondence. We leverage a graph neural partial differential equation (PDE) based on Beltrami flow to obtain high-dimensional features and position embeddings for point clouds. We incorporate position embeddings into a Transformer module based on a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) to efficiently represent patches within points. We employ the multi-level correspondence derived from the high feature similarity scores to facilitate alignment between point clouds. Subsequently, we use registration methods such as SVD-based algorithms to predict the transformation using corresponding point pairs. We evaluate PosDiffNet on several 3D point cloud datasets, verifying that it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for point cloud registration in large fields of view with perturbations. The implementation code of experiments is available at https://github.com/AI-IT-AVs/PosDiffNet.