3D Object Recognition and Pose Estimation From Point Cloud Using Stably Observed Point Pair Feature

Recognition and pose estimation from 3D free-form objects is a key step for autonomous robotic manipulation. Recently, the point pair features (PPF) voting approach has been shown to be effective for simultaneous object recognition and pose estimation. However, the global model descriptor (e.g., PPF and its variants) that contained some unnecessary point pair features decreases the recognition performance and increases computational efficiency. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel strategy for building a global model descriptor using stably observed point pairs. The stably observed point pairs are calculated from the partial view point clouds which are rendered by the virtual camera from various viewpoints. The global model descriptor is extracted from the stably observed point pairs and then stored in a hash table. Experiments on several datasets show that our proposed method reduces redundant point pair features and achieves better compromise of speed vs accuracy.