# Extend Your Own Correspondences: Unsupervised Distant Point Cloud Registration by Progressive Distance Extension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03532/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [PREDATOR: Registration of 3D Point Clouds with Low Overlap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13005/) (2020)
- [DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05575/) (2022)
- [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)
- [The Perfect Match: 3D Point Cloud Matching with Smoothed Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06879/) (2018)
- [CoFiNet: Reliable Coarse-to-fine Correspondences for Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14076/) (2021)
- [PRNet: Self-Supervised Learning for Partial-to-Partial Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12240/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Lepard: Learning partial point cloud matching in rigid and deformable scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12591/) (2021)
- [3D Registration with Maximal Cliques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10854/) (2023)
- [RGCNN: Regularized Graph CNN for Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02952/) (2018)
- [SC^2-PCR: A Second Order Spatial Compatibility for Efficient and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14453/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Register Any Point: Scaling 3D Point Cloud Registration by Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01850/) (2025)
- [BUFFER-X: Towards Zero-Shot Point Cloud Registration in Diverse Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07940/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Generalization Power in LiDAR Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10149/) (2025)
- [RARE: Refine Any Registration of Pairwise Point Clouds via Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19950/) (2025)
- [PseudoMapTrainer: Learning Online Mapping without HD Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18788/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration with Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07558/) (2024)
- [FLARES: Fast and Accurate LiDAR Multi-Range Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09274/) (2025)
- [TrafficLoc: Localizing Traffic Surveillance Cameras in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10308/) (2024)
- [3D Registration in 30 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13735/) (2024)
- [Mining and Transferring Feature-Geometry Coherence for Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01870/) (2024)
- [SingRef6D: Monocular Novel Object Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21927/) (2025)
- [Toward Zero-Shot Point Cloud Registration Across Diverse Scales, Scenes, and Sensor Setups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02759/) (2026)
- [PKSS-Align: Robust Point Cloud Registration on Pre-Kendall Shape Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04286/) (2025)
- [SOAR: Regression-based LiDAR Relocalization for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13267/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration via Training-Time Semantic Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15228/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Registration of point clouds collected from a pair of distant vehicles provides a comprehensive and accurate 3D view of the driving scenario, which is vital for driving safety related applications, yet existing literature suffers from the expensive pose label acquisition and the deficiency to generalize to new data distributions. In this paper, we propose EYOC, an unsupervised distant point cloud registration method that adapts to new point cloud distributions on the fly, requiring no global pose labels. The core idea of EYOC is to train a feature extractor in a progressive fashion, where in each round, the feature extractor, trained with near point cloud pairs, can label slightly farther point cloud pairs, enabling self-supervision on such far point cloud pairs. This process continues until the derived extractor can be used to register distant point clouds. Particularly, to enable high-fidelity correspondence label generation, we devise an effective spatial filtering scheme to select the most representative correspondences to register a point cloud pair, and then utilize the aligned point clouds to discover more correct correspondences. Experiments show that EYOC can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art supervised methods at a lower training cost. Moreover, it outwits supervised methods regarding generalization performance on new data distributions.
