English

Paired-CSLiDAR: Height-Stratified Registration for Cross-Source Aerial-Ground LiDAR Pose Refinement

Robotics 2026-05-04 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

We introduce Paired-CSLiDAR (CSLiDAR), a cross-source aerial-ground LiDAR benchmark for single-scan pose refinement: refining a ground-scan pose within a 50 m-radius aerial crop. The benchmark contains 12,683 ground-aerial pairs across 6 evaluation sites and per-scan reference 6-DoF alignments for sub-meter root-mean-square error (RMSE) evaluation. Because aerial scans capture rooftops and canopy while ground scans capture facades and under-canopy, the two modalities share only a fraction of their geometry, primarily the terrain surface, causing standard registration methods and learned correspondence models to converge to metrically incorrect local minima. We propose Residual-Guided Stratified Registration (RGSR), a training-free, geometry-only refinement pipeline that exploits the shared ground plane through height-stratified ICP, reversed registration directions, and confidence-gated accept-if-better selection. RGSR achieves 86.0% [email protected] m and 99.8% [email protected] m on the primary benchmark of 9,012 scans, outperforming both the confidence-gated cascade at 83.7% and GeoTransformer at 76.3%. We validate RMSE-based pose selection with independent survey control and trajectory consistency, and show that added Fourier-Mellin BEV proposals can reduce RMSE while increasing actual pose error under extreme partial overlap. The dataset and code are being prepared for public release.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.00634,
  title  = {Paired-CSLiDAR: Height-Stratified Registration for Cross-Source Aerial-Ground LiDAR Pose Refinement},
  author = {Montana Hoover and Jing Liang and Tianrui Guan and Dinesh Manocha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.00634},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures. Dataset and code are being prepared for public release