A hough transform based scan registration strategy for Mobile Robotic Mapping

The scan registration is the cornerstone to Mobile Robotic Mapping, and the majority of existing global registration methods are dependent on specific features. This paper presents a global feature-less scan registration strategy based on the ground surface, which is extremely common in Mobile Robotic Mapping scenarios. The 3D rotation is decoupled from 3D translation by transforming the input scans into the Hough domain, wherein Phase Only Matched Filtering (POMF) is adopted for the partially overlapped signal registration. No particular features in the input data are prerequisite to our algorithm. The algorithm is validated by the challenging scans captured by our custom-built platform and a public dataset. The result illustrates the reliability of this algorithm to align feature-less, partially overlapped and noisy scans.