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LI et al.: RIGID POINT SET REGISTRATION BASED ON CKF AND ITS APPLICATION IN INTELLIGENT VEHICLES 3
set registration. In their work, the prediction (time update)
relied on a proposed density that depends on the alignment
error. In the measurement model, a robust version of ICP
will run for a preset number of iterations, and the weights
of every particle will be updated accordingly. As is well
known, particle-filtering-based methods can hardly meet the
real-time requirement when the number of particles is large,
which means that such methods are not suitable in SLAM
applications or for map matching. Authors in [21] proposed
a UKF-based algorithm for use in medical imaging. This
algorithm outperforms some widely used algorithms (such
as ICP) in terms of outliers or additive Gaussian noise.
However, it assumes that the corresponding points between
the two data sets are known and that the noise in SSM is
constant. Moreover, UKF can only approximate nonlinearity
in quadratic items, which is not sufficiently precise in some
cases.
The method proposed in this paper is based on the basic
filtering scheme. In contrast to the UKF-based registration
method, we treat the point set as a whole rather than adding
one point after one iteration, and the correspondences between
points are not assumed to be known. The algorithm in this
paper is CKF based, and it can approximate the nonlinearity
in SSM in third-order statistics, which is more precise than
the UKF-based method. In contrast to ICP and many other
distance-optimization-based methods, the correspondence here
does not rely on the nearest neighbor algorithm, which will
make the algorithm in this paper more robust to initialization
misalignment. Compared to probability-based methods, this
method considers not only noise in the point sets but also
noise in the prediction model. The exploration of the predictive
space is neither infinite nor stationary but will be optimized
step by step as the iterations proceed. This is achieved by
CSA, which will make the exploration more effective. The
filtering process does not rely on the Monte Carlo concept such
as that in particle-filtering-based methods. This will greatly
decrease the runtime complexity. The precision and robustness
are guaranteed by CKF and CSA.
Work in this paper extends work in a conference paper
version [22] by providing a more detailed analysis of the
relation to previous studies on point set registration, and a
more comprehensive set of numerical experiments. Moreover,
the corresponding point selection method in this paper is based
on the proposed local shape descriptor, whereas that in the
conference paper is based on the simple nearest neighbor
assumption.
III. P
ROBLEM FORMULATION
In this section, the point set registration problem will be
formulated as an SSM with a process model and obser-
vation model. This decomposes the point set registration
problem into a dual-phase problem. To make the state move
toward the minimum every step, the system should be
dynamic and explore the probabilistic domain to the greatest
extent possible. Inspired by [21], the SSM is constructed as
follows.
Since we focus on the point set registration problem in
SLAM, only rigid registration is discussed here. Given two
point sets U ={u
1
, u
2
,...,u
m
} and Y ={y
1
, y
2
,...,y
n
},
the goal is to find the best rotation matrix Q, translation
vector t and a scalar s that minimize the distance between
these two point sets: Y − (sQU +t). In the SLAM problem,
the scalar s is constrained to 1. Thus, the SSM is formulated
as equation (1) and equation (2).
x
k
= F(x
k−1
, v
k−1
) = x
k−1
+ v(k − 1) (1)
y
k
= H(x
k
, u
k
, e
k
) = R(x
θ
k
)u
k
+ x
t
k
+ e(k) (2)
Equation (1) is the process model, and x
k
is the state
at step k.Thestatex
k
=[θ
x
k
,θ
y
k
,θ
z
k
, t
x
k
, t
y
k
, t
z
k
]
T
=
[(x
θ
k
)
T
,(x
t
k
)
T
]
T
is a 6×1 vector with rotation parameter x
θ
k
=
[θ
x
k
,θ
y
k
,θ
z
k
]
T
and translation parameter x
t
k
=[t
x
k
, t
y
k
, t
z
k
]
T
.
v(k) is the white Gaussian noise at step k with v(k − 1) ∼
N (x
k−1
;0, Q
k−1
),whereQ
k−1
is its covariance matrix. Note
that the noise is important in this situation. The noise is what
makes the process model dynamic. With the noise, the state x
k
can move a random step from the previous state x
k−1
. Thus,
the process model can also be called a stochastic dynamic
process. Since there is no accurate model for transform pre-
diction, this dynamic process can explore the probability space
and solve the local minimum problem. As iterations proceed,
the uncertainty in the state should decrease. Thus, a simulated
annealing scheme is adopted here. As the iteration goes on,
CSA will make the noise covariance smaller, which means that
the exploring space will become smaller, then the uncertainty
of the transform becomes smaller. This scheme will improve
convergence, which will be discussed in detail in the next
section.
Equation (2) is the observation model, and y
k
is the obser-
vation at step k. At every step, a new measurement y
k
will
be measured according to the input u
k
and the state x
k
.The
corresponding point u
k
is treated as control input and will
remain the same as u
k
= U. e(k) is the white Gaussian noise
at step k with e(k) ∼ N (y
k
;0, R
k
),whereR
k
is its covariance
matrix. R(x
θ
k
) is the rotation matrix formulated by the rotation
parameter as shown in equations (3) - (6).
R(x
θ
k
) = R
(θ
x
)
× R
(θ
y
)
× R
(θ
z
)
(3)
R
(θ
x
)
=
⎡
⎣
10 0
0cos(θ
x
) sin(θ
x
)
0 −sin(θ
x
) cos(θ
x
)
⎤
⎦
(4)
R
(θ
y
)
=
⎡
⎣
cos(θ
y
) 0 −sin(θ
y
)
01 0
sin(θ
y
) 0cos(θ
y
)
⎤
⎦
(5)
R
(θ
z
)
=
⎡
⎣
cos(θ
z
) sin(θ
z
) 0
−sin(θ
z
) cos(θ
z
) 0
001
⎤
⎦
(6)
Note that the observation model is a highly nonlinear
process with white Gaussian noise. The original Kalman filter
cannot deal with nonlinearity. Two well-known extensions to
deal with nonlinearity are the extended Kalman filter (EKF)
and UKF. EKF approximates the nonlinearity using the
first-order Taylor series expansion evaluated at the mean
estimation of state x. It ignores high-order terms, which may
cause nonnegligible error in some cases and can diverge when
nonlinearities are large. UKF approximates the nonlinearity