SE3ET: SE(3)-Equivariant Transformer for Low-Overlap Point Cloud Registration

Abstract

Partial point cloud registration is a challenging problem in robotics, especially when the robot undergoes a large transformation, causing a significant initial pose error and a low overlap between measurements. This letter proposes exploiting equivariant learning from 3D point clouds to improve registration robustness. We propose SE3ET, an SE(3)-equivariant registration framework that employs equivariant point convolution and equivariant transformer designs to learn expressive and robust geometric features. We tested the proposed registration method on indoor and outdoor benchmarks where the point clouds are under arbitrary transformations and low overlapping ratios. We also provide generalization tests and run-time performance.