Colored Point Cloud to Image Alignment

Recognition and segmentation of objects in images enjoy the wealth of large volume of well annotated data. At the other end, when dealing with the reconstruction of geometric structures of objects from images, there is a limited amount of accurate data available for supervised learning. One type of such geometric data with insufficient amount required for deep learning is real world accurate RGB-D images. The lack of accurate RGB-D datasets is one of the obstacles in the evolution of geometric scene reconstructions from images. One solution to creating such a dataset is to capture RGB images while simultaneously using an accurate depth scanning device that assigns a depth value to each pixel. A major challenge in acquiring such ground truth data is the accurate alignment between the RGB images and the measured depth and color profiles. We introduce a differential optimization method that aligns a colored point cloud to a given color image via iterative geometric and color matching. The proposed method enables the construction of RGB-D datasets for specific camera systems. In the suggested framework, the optimization minimizes the difference between the colors of the image pixels and the corresponding colors of the projected points to the camera plane. We assume that the colors produced by the geometric scanner camera and the color camera sensor are different and thus are characterized by different chromatic acquisition properties. We align the different color spaces while compensating for their corresponding color appearance. Under this setup, we find the transformation between the camera image and the point cloud colors by iterating between matching the relative location of the point cloud and matching colors. The successful alignments produced by the proposed method are demonstrated on both synthetic data with quantitative evaluation and real world scenes with qualitative results.