# Skeleton-based Robust Registration Framework for Corrupted 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24273 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24273/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Deep Closest Point: Learning Representations for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03304/) (2019)
- [PointNetLK: Robust & Efficient Point Cloud Registration using PointNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05711/) (2019)
- [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)
- [KISS-ICP: In Defense of Point-to-Point ICP -- Simple, Accurate, and Robust Registration If Done the Right Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15397/) (2022)
- [Robust Point Cloud Registration Framework Based on Deep Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04256/) (2021)
- [GeoTransformer: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration with Geometric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03768/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition Against Common Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12296/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking and Analyzing Point Cloud Classification under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03377/) (2022)
- [PCRNet: Point Cloud Registration Network using PointNet Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07906/) (2019)
- [Point2Skeleton: Learning Skeletal Representations from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00230/) (2020)
- [Deep Depth Completion from Extremely Sparse Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05335/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Merger: an Unsupervised Aligned Keypoint Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10814/) (2021)
- [3D Adversarial Attacks Beyond Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12146/) (2021)
- [RIGA: Rotation-Invariant and Globally-Aware Descriptors for Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13252/) (2022)
- [Advancements in Point Cloud Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12113/) (2023)
- [Computing Medial Axis Transform with Feature Preservation via Restricted Power Diagram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13676/) (2022)
- [PCDNF: Revisiting Learning-based Point Cloud Denoising via Joint Normal Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00798/) (2022)
- [PointCAT: Contrastive Adversarial Training for Robust Point Cloud Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07788/) (2022)
- [Lidar with Velocity: Correcting Moving Objects Point Cloud Distortion from Oscillating Scanning Lidars by Fusion with Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09497/) (2021)
- [Variational Relational Point Completion Network for Robust 3D Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09131/) (2023)
- [Equi-GSPR: Equivariant SE(3) Graph Network Model for Sparse Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05729/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud registration is fundamental in 3D vision applications, including autonomous driving, robotics, and medical imaging, where precise alignment of multiple point clouds is essential for accurate environment reconstruction. However, real-world point clouds are often affected by sensor limitations, environmental noise, and preprocessing errors, making registration challenging due to density distortions, noise contamination, and geometric deformations. Existing registration methods rely on direct point matching or surface feature extraction, which are highly susceptible to these corruptions and lead to reduced alignment accuracy. To address these challenges, a skeleton-based robust registration framework is presented, which introduces a corruption-resilient skeletal representation to improve registration robustness and accuracy. The framework integrates skeletal structures into the registration process and combines the transformations obtained from both the corrupted point cloud alignment and its skeleton alignment to achieve optimal registration. In addition, a distribution distance loss function is designed to enforce the consistency between the source and target skeletons, which significantly improves the registration performance. This framework ensures that the alignment considers both the original local geometric features and the global stability of the skeleton structure, resulting in robust and accurate registration results. Experimental evaluations on diverse corrupted datasets demonstrate that SRRF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art registration methods across various corruption scenarios, including density distortions, noise contamination, and geometric deformations. The results confirm the robustness of SRRF in handling corrupted point clouds, making it a potential approach for 3D perception tasks in real-world scenarios.
