HSM3D | Andrea Censi's website

Andrea Censi and Stefano Carpin. HSM3D: feature-less global 6DOF scan-matching in the Hough/Radon domain. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Kobe, Japan, May 2009. pdfdoi supp. material slides

bibtex

    @inproceedings{censi09hsm3d,
        author = "Censi, Andrea and Carpin, Stefano",
        doi = "10.1109/ROBOT.2009.5152431",
        title = "{HSM3D}: Feature-Less Global {6DOF} Scan-Matching in the {H}ough/{R}adon Domain",
        url = "http://purl.org/censi/2008/hsm3d",
        booktitle = "Proceedings of the {IEEE} International Conference on Robotics and Automation ({ICRA})",
        year = "2009",
        month = "May",
        slides = "http://purl.org/censi/research/2009-icra-hsm3d-slides.pdf",
        address = "Kobe, Japan",
        pdf = "http://purl.org/censi/research/2009-icra-hsm3d.pdf",
        abstract = "This paper presents HSM3D, an algorithm for global rigid6DOF alignment of 3D point clouds. The algorithm works byprojecting the two input sets into the Radon/Hough domain,whose properties allow to decompose the 6DOF search into aseries of fast one-dimensional cross-correlations. Noplanes or other particular features must be present in theinput data, and the algorithm is provably complete in thecase of noise-free input. The algorithm has beenexperimentally validated on publicly available data sets."
    }

paper

slides

(PDF)
(not so documented) Matlab source code: ZIP or browse. Be aware that in Matlab, it takes minutes to do one matching. However, it visualizes everything.
C++ source code available here.
Here are some movies that show the HS.

Abstract -- This paper presents HSM3D, an algorithm for global rigid 6DOF alignment of 3D point clouds. The algorithm works by projecting the two input sets into the Radon/Hough domain, whose properties allow to decompose the 6DOF search into a series of fast one-dimensional cross-correlations. No planes or other particular features must be present in the input data, and the algorithm is provably complete in the case of noise-free input. The algorithm has been experimentally validated on publicly available data sets.

Example of HS