Registration of point clouds from kinect with congruent spheres

In this paper, a novel method for solving the registration of point clouds from Kinect is proposed. The proposed method, which requires neither initializations nor iterations, is totally different from the ICP algorithm. The basic idea of this method is to use the congruent spheres centered at the corresponding points as guidance, and then search for an increasing number of corresponding points. Since the image and 3D point cloud of the scene are both available from a Kinect device, we can readily obtain some 3D corresponding points according to the matched 2D SIFT-keypoints between images. Finally, the registration of point clouds can be achieved by applying least square to the searched corresponding points. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method to the ICP algorithm.