HTMC: hierarchical tolerance mask correspondence for human body point cloud registration

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2023 Dec 21:9:e1724. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1724. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Point cloud registration can be solved by searching for correspondence pairs. Searching for correspondence pairs in human body point clouds poses some challenges, including: (1) the similar geometrical shapes of the human body are difficult to distinguish. (2) The symmetry of the human body confuses the correspondence pairs searching. To resolve the above issues, this article proposes a Hierarchical Tolerance Mask Correspondence (HTMC) method to achieve better alignment by tolerating obfuscation. First, we define various levels of correspondence pairs and assign different similarity scores for each level. Second, HTMC designs a tolerance loss function to tolerate the obfuscation of correspondence pairs. Third, HTMC uses a differentiable mask to diminish the influence of non-overlapping regions and enhance the influence of overlapping regions. In conclusion, HTMC acknowledges the presence of similar local geometry in human body point clouds. On one hand, it avoids overfitting caused by forcibly distinguishing similar geometries, and on the other hand, it prevents genuine correspondence relationships from being masked by similar geometries. The codes are available at https://github.com/ChenPointCloud/HTMC.

Keywords: 3D point matching; Computer vision; Point cloud registration.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62202346), the Hubei Key Research and Development Program (No. 2021BAA042), the Open Project of Engineering Research Center of Hubei Province for Clothing Information (No. 2022HBCI01), the Wuhan Applied Basic Frontier Research project (No. 2022013988065212), MIIT’s AI Industry Innovation Task unveils flagship projects (Key technologies, equipment, and systems for flexible customized and intelligent manufacturing in the clothing industry), and the Hubei Science and Technology Project of Safe Production Special Fund (Scene control platform based on proprioception information computing of artificial intelligence). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.