# Fully-Geometric Cross-Attention for Point Cloud Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Feature-metric Registration: A Fast Semi-supervised Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01014/) (2020)
- [Robust Point Cloud Registration Framework Based on Deep Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04256/) (2021)
- [3DRegNet: A Deep Neural Network for 3D Point Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01701/) (2019)
- [REGTR: End-to-end Point Cloud Correspondences with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14517/) (2022)
- [A comprehensive survey on point cloud registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02690/) (2021)
- [Rotation-Invariant Transformer for Point Cloud Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08231/) (2023)
- [You Only Hypothesize Once: Point Cloud Registration with Rotation-equivariant Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00182/) (2021)
- [OMNet: Learning Overlapping Mask for Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00937/) (2021)
- [PatchFormer: An Efficient Point Transformer with Patch Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00207/) (2021)
- [Learning general and distinctive 3D local deep descriptors for point cloud registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10382/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Deep Probabilistic Approach for Partial Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13290/) (2023)
- [T2TD: Text-3D Generation Model based on Prior Knowledge Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15753/) (2023)
- [Overlap-guided Gaussian Mixture Models for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09836/) (2022)

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

- [PoInit-of-View: Poisoning Initialization of Views Transfers Across Multiple 3D Reconstruction Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16540/) (2026)
- [Clustering-Enhanced Domain Adaptation for Cross-Domain Intrusion Detection in Industrial Control Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12183/) (2026)
- [Medoid Prototype Alignment for Cross-Plant Unknown Attack Detection in Industrial Control Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25544/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud registration approaches often fail when the overlap between point clouds is low due to noisy point correspondences. This work introduces a novel cross-attention mechanism tailored for Transformer-based architectures that tackles this problem, by fusing information from coordinates and features at the super-point level between point clouds. This formulation has remained unexplored primarily because it must guarantee rotation and translation invariance since point clouds reside in different and independent reference frames. We integrate the Gromov-Wasserstein distance into the cross-attention formulation to jointly compute distances between points across different point clouds and account for their geometric structure. By doing so, points from two distinct point clouds can attend to each other under arbitrary rigid transformations. At the point level, we also devise a self-attention mechanism that aggregates the local geometric structure information into point features for fine matching. Our formulation boosts the number of inlier correspondences, thereby yielding more precise registration results compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We have conducted an extensive evaluation on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, KITTI, and 3DCSR datasets.