Evaluation of the robustness of planar-patches based 3D-registration using marker-based ground-truth in an outdoor urban scenario

The recently introduced Minimum Uncertainty Maximum Consensus (MUMC) algorithm for 3D scene registration using planar-patches is tested in a large outdoor urban setting without any prior motion estimate whatsoever. With the aid of a new overlap metric based on unmatched patches, the algorithm is shown to work successfully in most cases. The absolute accuracy of its computed result is corroborated for the first time by ground-truth obtained using reflective markers. There were a couple of unsuccessful scan-pairs. These are analyzed for the reason of failure by formulating two kinds of overlap metrics: one based on the actual overlapping surface-area and another based on the extent of agreement of range-image pixels. We conclude that neither metric in isolation is able to predict all failures, but that both taken together are able to predict the difficulty level of a scan-pair vis-à-vis registration by MUMC.