A Geometry-Based Local Descriptor for Range Data

We present a novel local descriptor for range data that can describe one or more planes or lines in a local region. It is possible to recover the geometry of the described local region and extract the size, position and orientation of each local plane or line-like structure from the descriptor. This gives the descriptor a property that other popular local descriptors for range data, such as spin images or point signatures, does not have. The estimation of the descriptor is dependant on estimation of surface normals but does not depend on the specific normal estimation method used. It is shown that is possible to extract how many planar surface regions the descriptor represents and that this could be used as a point-of-interest detector.