The recent development of high-precision subsea optical scanners allows for 3D keypoint detectors and feature descriptors to be leveraged on point cloud scans from subsea environments. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey to identify the best combination of detectors and descriptors to be used in these challenging and novel environments. This paper aims to identify the best detector/descriptor pair using a challenging field dataset collected using a commercial underwater laser scanner. Furthermore, studies have shown that incorporating texture information to extend geometric features adds robustness to feature matching on synthetic datasets. This paper also proposes a novel method of fusing images with underwater laser scans to produce coloured point clouds, which are used to study the effectiveness of 6D point cloud descriptors.
@article{arxiv.2209.12881,
title = {Performance Evaluation of 3D Keypoint Detectors and Descriptors on Coloured Point Clouds in Subsea Environments},
author = {Kyungmin Jung and Thomas Hitchcox and James Richard Forbes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.12881},
year = {2024}
}