Performance Evaluation of 3D Local Surface Descriptors for Low and High Resolution Range Image Registration

Despite the advent and popularity of low-cost commercial sensors (e.g., Microsoft Kinect), research in 3D vision still primarily focuses on the development of advanced algorithms geared towards high resolution data. This paper presents a comparative performance evaluation of renowned state-of-the-art 3D local surface descriptors for the task of registration of both high and low resolution range image data. The datasets used in these experiments are the renowned high resolution Stanford 3D models dataset and challenging low resolution Washington RGB-D object dataset. Experimental results show that the performance of certain local surface descriptors is significantly affected by low resolution data.