# LPRnet: A self-supervised registration network for LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05669 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05669/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration using PointNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05711/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Go-ICP: A Globally Optimal Solution to 3D ICP Point-Set Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03344/) (2016)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [Feature-metric Registration: A Fast Semi-supervised Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01014/) (2020)
- [DeepICP: An End-to-End Deep Neural Network for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04153/) (2019)
- [Fast and Robust Iterative Closest Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07627/) (2020)
- [Overlap-guided Gaussian Mixture Models for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09836/) (2022)
- [Cross-source Point Cloud Registration: Challenges, Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13570/) (2023)
- [FF-LOGO: Cross-Modality Point Cloud Registration with Feature Filtering and Local to Global Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08966/) (2023)
- [VRHCF: Cross-Source Point Cloud Registration via Voxel Representation and Hierarchical Correspondence Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10085/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [An Enhanced Geometric-Spectral Feature Learning Framework for Airborne Multispectral Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LiDAR and photogrammetry are active and passive remote sensing techniques for point cloud acquisition, respectively, offering complementary advantages and heterogeneous. Due to the fundamental differences in sensing mechanisms, spatial distributions and coordinate systems, their point clouds exhibit significant discrepancies in density, precision, noise, and overlap. Coupled with the lack of ground truth for large-scale scenes, integrating the heterogeneous point clouds is a highly challenging task. This paper proposes a self-supervised registration network based on a masked autoencoder, focusing on heterogeneous LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds. At its core, the method introduces a multi-scale masked training strategy to extract robust features from heterogeneous point clouds under self-supervision. To further enhance registration performance, a rotation-translation embedding module is designed to effectively capture the key features essential for accurate rigid transformations. Building upon the robust representations, a transformer-based architecture seamlessly integrates local and global features, fostering precise alignment across diverse point cloud datasets. The proposed method demonstrates strong feature extraction capabilities for both LiDAR and photogrammetric point clouds, addressing the challenges of acquiring ground truth at the scene level. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in solving heterogeneous point cloud registration problems.